Covid-19 has now claimed more lives in the United States than the 1918 pandemic commonly referred to as the ‘Spanish Flu’. This makes it the deadliest pandemic ever in the United States. As of 22:00 on Tuesday, the death toll due to Covid-19 in this country stands at 6.76,076, according to an update from Our World In Data. And according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the 1918 pandemic killed more than 6.75,000 people in the United States.
According to an editor of the Postgraduate Medical Journal, the 1918 pandemic was first reported from Madrid, but the flu did not actually originate in Spain.
Global and regional mortality estimates differ. For India, a 2016 survey in the journal Demography estimated the toll to be between 12 million and 13 million (1.2–1.3 million). Globally, the pandemic of 1918 killed at least 50 million (5 crore), according to estimates cited by the CDC.
But a 2018 study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology suggested that about 17.4 million people died globally as a result of influenza. Even this conservative estimate is many times higher than the global death rate from COVID-19 (4.7 million) so far.
