How did the Spanish Flu end in 1919/1920?
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Like this one, the Spanish flu generally killed a specific population; sure there were outliers, just like now, but people who were most likely to die were young adults.
They died.
Other people caught it and developed immunity. With no one left to kill, and no way to infect it died out. Some viruses kill their hosts before they can infect too many others, thereby effectively putting themselves extinct; that’s a big part of what happened with the flu of 1918. Although people did wear masks and socially distance to try to protect their family members.
Some viruses are super deadly, but difficult to spread, or rather, require very specific spread. That’s why Ebola didn’t destroy us all. You really need contact with the blood to catch it, and that is easier to control for.
Covid spreads really easily AND asymptomatically, so people who are sick don’t know they are getting others sick. And it doesn’t kill everyone in its path, like Ebola might if it were more easily spread; its really found a sweet spot of transmissability.
Viruses mutate and evolve. Over time it evolved to be less deadly. More and more people survived catching it and developed immunity to it. Immunity can be passed onto offspring somewhat and so children born could already have some immunity to it either preventing them from catching it or making it so they could survive it easier.
It’s actually still around and people still catch it every year.
it ran rampant, and infected pretty much everyone it could (500,000,000 people) and killed everyone it could (50,000,000 people).
So, it was a world where the most vulnerable had already died, and people that survived had an immunity to it. So the transmission rate dropped below a level that would keep it going, and it started to die out because the rate of spread was lower.
It’s still around now though.
A virus doesn’t have to be deadly to be successful; dead people are much less likely to spread the virus than people who have it and only have mild symptoms. The most successful viruses keep the host alive but is highly contagious kind of like herpes. The epidemic ended when the virus mutated and became less deadly.
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