What was the cure for the 1918 Influenza Epidemic?
There was no cure. The 1918 H1N1 strain was extraordinarily contagious and probably about 1/3 of the world’s population was infected. It killed about 1 in 20 of those who caught it — over 8x the death rate in other flu outbreaks. And the victims were not the usual victims of the ‘winter flu (young/elderly) but those in the prime of their life (20-40 year olds). All that could be done at the time was to wait until the terror burned itself out. Finally, in the spring of 1919 after 6 devastating months, it did just that — then vanished just as suddenly and mysteriously as it had appeared. Essentially, the virus had killed all the hosts whose immune system couldn’t fight it off (50-100 million people), and it had nowhere left to go.
