The disease ran wild, infecting perhaps a third of the Earth's population and killing as many as 50 Million people. This is the story of the flu pandemic of 1918-1920, which was far more destructive than the current pandemic.
But the current pandemic is not over, by a long shot. Historians find some eerie and uncomfortable parallels between the two disease outbreaks, and some of them recently published a paper laying out those parallels.
Christopher Nichols of Oregon State University and Nancy Bristow of the University of Puget Sound are the top-listed authors on the paper. They join us for an extended discussion of the similarities and differences between last century's big pandemic and the one going on now.