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Message:: [QUOTE="kevin McGonigal, post: 4171974, member: 72790"]I believe it was Fort Hays which was receiving recruits from all over the country and then sending them overseas. What was strange about the "Spanish" flu was that it abated at Fort Hays and went dormant for several months and then reemerged with a vengeance as a pandemic coming back to the US just as the War was ending. No doubt about the statistics. That influenza killed  more people in less than one year than were killed in all of the Great War. It was estimated to have a 2% mortality rate. It was most lethal among the demographic of health young adults, not the very young or elderly. Apparently the virus triggered an over response of the victims' immune systems and that over response caused massive tissue damage in the lungs. As bad as that was think of how much worse it was for those of the Ancient world who knew almost nothing about contagion, which was understood by the early 20th Century although the state of medicine circa 1918 was such that appealing to Salus or Aesculapius might have been as effective as whatever else they tried. The media did not cover the epidemic that much as the big news was the ending of the Great War and then the Paris Peace Conference.[/QUOTE]