Much worse Spanish Flu

Increase the mortality rate of the Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1918-1919 to 35%. How does this change the 20th century afterwards?
 
Certainly one change would be to have all the infected on the Wikipedia list to actually die in TTL. No doubt there could be many others.
Would sterility also be on the increase? How about contagion? I could see isolation zones set up around the country, either to confine the afflicted or shelter the healthy (and wealthy).
 
Even if President Wilson doesn't die of it, the strain from a much worse Spanish Flu during his Presidency could make his stroke a fatal one, too.

There aren't as many well known Asian notables on that list. Could it somehow spread to the East as rapidly as it did to the West? Say a group of Americans happens to go over there from California not knowing they have it. I'm not sure what the period was for it but it was long enough that troops were able to carry it to Europe. Having it spread more rapidly in China, which has entered the warlord phase IIRC, could increase the numbers dramatically right there.

(Wikipedia says ojne theory is it came from China and mutated in the U.S. - I don't know enough about these thigns to know if that means they'd be more resistant in China or not. I'd think not since it had mutated but I don't know. Perhaps it depends on how much it mutated.)
 

Flubber

Banned
There aren't as many well known Asian notables on that list. Could it somehow spread to the East as rapidly as it did to the West?


It did. There aren't many Asian notables on the Wiki list because of Wiki's (unintended) western bias. The Pandemic infected and killed people worldwide from coal miners and Inuit on Arctic islands to gauchos in Patagonia to herdsmen in Mongolia. Only completely isolated populations like the PNG highlanders were spared.

As for the source, one current theory have a strain arising at a US Army training post in Kansas. (Perhaps coincidentally soon after several hundred tons of horse manure had been burned for disposal.) That strain was carried to France where, much like syphilis in the Columbian Exchange, it contacted another strain of influenza and the "Spanish" flu was the result. Another theory has the Flu arising in Austria in 1917. Whatever the original source, the current identified Patient Zero for the flu died at an army camp in France.
 
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