Ending lockdowns,1918 Spanish flu.....

 Thank you, Carbon!!  That was a great bit of history.

Proves my point exactly!  

You can't take the parachute off until you are safely on the ground. 

(Ie. Don't come out of lockdown until Covid is GONE - NOT SUPPRESSED, GONE.)

Not that anyone will listen, anyway.

EdwinSm-History is no exact science...on most subjects historians disagree. Even chosing a subject is subjective...

I think comparing the Spanish Flu with Covid19 "has its limits" since this "is not the flu"...Also the "Spanish Flu" in Europe was a different story then the one in the US. In my opinion transports of troops most likely was the main factor in the Spanish Flu, military parades, censorship on the epidemic due to war...

To be honest...I do not think it is a very good story...a bit of falsification of history. Trying to link the present covid-fatigue with the 1918 pandemic via "creative writing"...

Most people had very limited travel capacity in those days-a major difference with 2020. Blaming the Spanish Flu on "pandemic fatigue" I think is non-sense....(with all respect to carbon20).

When you look at statistics of deaths from infectious diseases for say 1880 till 2020 the number of deaths till 1900 is (far) above the number of even the 1918/19 Spanish Flu...(Dr.J.C. had a nice chart...I googled for some statistics could not find one..) 

Putting a 2021 story in a story of a 1919 healthcrisis can get misleading. It is correct to claim international air travel was not stopped in 1919...the air travel that was there was limited-often military. From the UK to France-not (yet) long distance. (It is also correct to claim nobody took vaccines against the flu...But there were some vaccines in an early stage-maybe even making things worse..)

World War 1 ended november 1918-some even link it to the pandemic. Transport of millions of soldiers on packed trains and ships to barracks that were overcrowded-first to the front lines then back to the UK, US, etc. I think was one "motor" of the Spanish Flu. Maybe you can even link the three waves with mass transports...

Another factor was a lack of knowledge on how infectious diseases worked. Virusses were as good as unknown in that time-the "theory that would lead to the discovery of virusses" was been used in vaccines...but bio-science was very limited.

Last year there was some discussion on the 1890 Russian Flu...could it have been a corona virus ? Given the symptoms were more similar with wath we did see in 2020 SARS-2. But in 1890 variants did not show up making a corona virus pandemic that different from a flu pandemic. It can be both number of infections and transport were limited enough-and we were lucky-maybe timing also a factor-that if the 1890 pandemic was a corona virus we did not see (much) variants (of risk) back then...The 1890 Russian Flu was linked to Russian railways as a transport route...

To have a pandemic you need an infectious disease, enough hosts and transport to get the disease into the hosts...

When I was looking for historic statistics I found this [url]https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2004361[/url] or https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2004361 internet is a never ending source of information...