When it comes to the largest and deadliest plague in history, we have to mention the 1918 flu, which first broke out in the United States and was later dubbed the "Spanish flu".
At a time when the world's total population was only 1.7 billion, this terrible plague was called a catastrophe, infecting nearly 500 million people and killing more than 50 million people in just over a year.
Such a tragic consequence even caused countries to end the First World War, which was going on at that time, because a large number of young and middle-aged people were infected and died, and directly rewrote the history of mankind.
The first recorded case of this apocalyptic plague that swept the world came from an American named Albert Gitchell.
In March 1918, Albert, who worked as a cook in a 54,000-strong U.S. military barracks, was forced to be hospitalized with a fever of over 40 degrees. At first, everyone except Albert's family didn't pay much attention to it, and the senior commanders of the barracks didn't even know about his illness. And Albert's colleagues and friends were only when he contracted the common influenza in the spring.
However, to everyone's surprise, it was this seemingly inconspicuous "flu" that quickly spread in the barracks in the next few days. Due to the extremely dense flow of people in the barracks during World War I, Albert's work before his illness was destined to involve him in contact with a large number of soldiers every day, and the management of health and diseases in the army at that time was not professional and standardized.
By the end of the month, more than 1,100 people had been hospitalized with the exceptionally severe flu and 38 soldiers had died from the pneumonia caused by the flu.
Normally, such a transmissible epidemic with a high fatality rate should have attracted the attention of the US military and government, but after internal discussions, the US military chose to block the news and downplay the impact, forcibly suppressing the outbreak in the military camp.
The U.S. military and government chose to do so because it was a critical moment in World War I, and the more than 50,000 soldiers gathered in this barracks would also go to the front lines of the European theater.
Therefore, the military does not want this unexplained flu epidemic to affect the morale of the military and the next military battle plan, and there is also a more important reason that the US government is worried that the large number of sick soldiers will give a large number of recruited recruits an excuse to escape military service, and interfere with the recruitment process that is in full swing across the country.
All in all, out of consideration of various interests, the US government not only did not block this military camp, but instead transported all these soldiers to the front line of the European theater according to the original plan, and it was this choice that opened this Pandora's box full of plague and death.
These infected U.S. soldiers became plague spreaders on the battlefield, causing the flu virus to spread throughout Europe at an unimaginable rate. In less than two months, there have been widespread outbreaks in countries including the United Kingdom, France, Spain and Italy. At its worst, about three-quarters of the French army alone were infected with the virus, and more than half of the British army was infected, and by the end of the spring of 1918, almost all of Europe was under the threat of the flu.
The only good thing is that at that time, this new influenza virus was only very transmissible, and in most cases the fatality rate was not much higher than that of the common influenza virus, and most patients slowly recovered after a few days of high fever and malaise.
However, it is precisely because of this that the danger of the plague was greatly underestimated by the governments of the time, and for the same consideration as the US government and military, the countries of Europe at war have invariably adopted extremely strict wartime news censorship, choosing to block any report related to the super flu from the public.
Spain, which had declared neutrality during this period, was one of the few countries in Europe that did not practice wartime censorship, so the country's media covered the unprecedented superflu so much that Spain became the "first to discover the new virus" and the "most infected" country in the eyes of various countries.
In this way, Spain became the "birthplace" of this super plague because of the report of the real situation, and carried this huge black pot for the United States, and until now many countries still name the "Spanish flu" as the great plague of 1918, which will forever be recorded in human history.
As spring passes, the widespread superflu appears to be showing signs of waning like the common flu virus, and many governments are optimistic that the outbreak will soon pass as the number of people with antibodies increases. However, the course of events did not go as expected, and the superficial improvement was only the last calm before the storm.
As governments around the world allow the epidemic to run rampant, a large number of transmissions and infections are still inevitable in the lethality of dangerous mutations, the mutated new virus originally appeared from the first is no longer known, but the mutated harm is soon shown in front of humanity. The fatality rate of the mutated virus has jumped from a few tenths of a percent to 10 percent! It has become a veritable plague of death, and it often takes only one day for a young adult to go from being infected with this mutant virus to suffocating from severe pneumonia and fluid accumulation.
In the autumn of 1918, a troop carrier returning to Britain from Sierra Leone, Africa, a large number of soldiers were infected with this mutated influenza virus, and before they arrived at the British military port, nearly eighty percent of the soldiers on board were crushed by this deadly mutant virus, and there was a mortality rate of up to 10% among the sick soldiers. And this terrible situation is far more than just a ship, when the soldiers have struggled to land on land, and the British Royal Navy, which manages the military port, has not done any effective quarantine measures at all, just simply admitted the sick soldiers and let the rest of the personnel move around at will.
It is difficult to say whether the second outbreak of the flu originated from the British troop carriers, but it is certain that the same situation occurred at the same time in almost every country participating in the war, and the European governments, who were overly aware of the impact of the flu, finally paid an irreparable and tragic price.
In the autumn of 1918, with the rapid expansion of the infection rate of the mutant virus, tens of thousands of elderly people and children died in the agony of the epidemic. What is even more alarming to governments is that the number of deaths caused by the second mutant influenza shows a statistically obvious "W" shaped distribution, that is, the people with high mortality rates are not only the elderly and children with low immunity, but also young adults aged 20-35 who should have the highest recovery rate!
The explanation given by scientists for this bizarre distribution of deaths is that the mutated virus has been qualitatively changed and enhanced in terms of reproduction speed and aggressiveness, so it will cause a more violent response from the body's immune system. Due to the strong immune system of young adults, the high fever and inflammation caused by this condition are also more intense, and can even cause damage to important organs, especially the lungs, resulting in the death of the patient due to breathing difficulties. This overreaction of the immune system, later referred to by researchers as a cytokine storm, compared to the elderly and children because of their weak immunity, the immune system response triggered by the virus is also relatively mild, but it gives the body a chance to slowly recuperate.
In short, whatever the reason, the immediate problem facing European governments at the time was that it was difficult for countries to sustain the war because of the mass deaths and incapacity of the influenza virus, which was the main force of the war.
But even so, European and American politicians, who have been crazy about the war, still refuse to give up their interests easily, while suppressing the transmission of epidemic information with more bloody and harsh means, while preaching to the people that "the threat brought by war to us is far greater than the risk of virus transmission", desperately sending healthy young adults in China to the front line. At the same time, countries also vainly wanted to curb the threat of the epidemic to the frontline troops by strengthening the medical conditions of the army, such as the US government at that time sent nearly 10,000 experienced medical personnel to the front line, hoping to maintain the combat effectiveness of the army.
However, in the harsh battlefield environment at that time, this brainless increase in medical personnel was a drop in the bucket to fight the epidemic, not only did not help in the slightest to fight the epidemic, but led to the emptiness of the domestic medical force, so the number of infected patients and deaths further surged.
In addition, many human factors have further multiplied the adverse effects of the epidemic, such as the exclusion of a large number of health care workers from Africa and Asia from the fight against the epidemic due to deep-rooted racial discrimination in the West. In fact, the influenza virus also affected the vast African region at that time, and some Asian regions including Japan and Taiwan Province of the mainland, but there is a clear difference in the fatality rate of the virus in Asia and Africa compared to Europe, not only the death toll is very low, but the symptoms after infection are relatively mild. If Europe and the United States can abandon their preconceptions and accept a large number of highly skilled African medical personnel, the harm caused by this mega-epidemic can be greatly reduced.
Although European countries also invested a lot of money in setting up specialized laboratories to find out the weaknesses of the virus and how to deal with it, during World War I, when the technology was relatively backward and the accuracy of the microscope was not even enough to detect the virus individuals, such efforts were destined to be difficult to achieve results in the short term.
By the time the superepidemic finally reached its peak in the winter of 1918, the number of infected people was already in the hundreds of millions, tens of millions of people were killed, and even high-level people in various governments could not escape the threat of the virus. At this point, it is useless to suppress and conceal the severity of the epidemic through propaganda means, because almost every family has a loved one who died as a result of the catastrophe.
Of course, more importantly, because the number of deaths among young people was so great that the countries could no longer afford to sustain the war in World War I, the war finally came to an end with the surrender of Germany. Although the mutant influenza virus struck again the following spring, the harm caused by the second outbreak was far less severe due to the fact that the movement of the population was no longer so frequent after the end of the war, and the large number of recovered antibodies around the world. Of course, even so, the third outbreak of the 1918 influenza virus eventually took the lives of millions of people.