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comment by b_b
b_b  ·  3346 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Top Ten Causes of Death

    (and happy as fuck, by the way, to skip out on that whole "Great War" thing. Man, what a dip)

I think that dip was actually the flu, although I suppose if not for WWI we likely wouldn't have been hit by the flu so hard.





kleinbl00  ·  3346 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah, i think you're right. That book on the spanish flu I've been putting off? Still putting it off.

b_b  ·  3346 days ago  ·  link  ·  

US didn't lose that many people in the war. Relative to our population, we lost slightly more than 0.1%, so even dying somewhat young as many of those men did, it would be hard to parse the signal from the noise. The flu? 0.7%, and you can bet that lots of the dead were babies, which weights the average down quite a bit. Interestingly, in looking up the numbers, I found some reports that say that about half the US soldiers who died in WWI actually died of the flu and weren't enemy casualties.