
Last night I watched a documentary on BBC iPlayer about the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic, which may have killed between 50m and 100m people. Like Covid-19 it killed people by attacking the lungs. People drowned in their own blood. It reinforced my feeling that I do not want to catch this thing. It also made scary viewing because the flu came in 1918, killed, went away and then came back again, in 1919, more deadly than ever. Health services were totally overwhelmed and couldn't do much anyhow. Care was mostly palliative.