Wank the Spanish Flu

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Mother Nature really missed an opportunity to completely screwover the human race in 1917-1918 - so your challenge is to pick up the slack so-to-speak.

With any post-1900 PoD - your job is to wank Spanish Influenza pandemic as much as possible.

Bonus points of your roughly describe its political effects on the world in the aftermath.
 
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The 1918 Influenza pandemic was notable in that it was particularly devastating to the young and healthy as opposed to the elderly and very young being the usual groups who died from influenza. This means you take out the most productive members of society as well as those in their years of maximum fertility affecting population regrowth. Of course the elderly and very young were also killed by this flu. The Black Death killed up to 1/3 of the population of Europe. This killed feudalism as a social system, opened up Europe for various invasions (Mongols, Ottomans, etc) in the wake of the plague. The emotional impact on the population was huge. So let us assume that the Spanish Flu takes out 1/3 of the populations that are affected by it. OTL the only populations that avoided the flu were those that were isolated by geography or quarantine. An example of the former were villages in Alaska that had so little contact with outside villages, for the latter American Samoa was strictly quarantined and missed the epidemic. Here you'll see isolated populations surviving pretty much intact - however the vast majority of these will be very backward. In 1918 losing 1/3 of the population of the industrialized world, plus a big chunk of places like China and India will be devastating but would not lead to the sort of collapse we would see today with the interconnectedness for food, trade, etc.

Countries like the USA and Russia, which have or potentially have the ability to be relatively self sufficient in food and raw materials would do better in keeping their standard of living at a decent level. Because of the large number of young men in many countries in 1918 being in the military in conditions more amenable to disease transmission, you could very well end up with a large number of "excess" women. Multiple marriage may become socially acceptable. While the populations of Africa and some parts elsewhere that are pretty isolated will maintain themselves better, unless the industrial countries totally collapse as they are too far behind politically and economically.
 
Wanking the Spanish flu is actually pretty hard. The WWI troopships and trench conditions basically made it into an involuntarily-created biological weapon in terms of virulence (due to the way it created such a nasty immune response that the body shredded itself) there were a number of non-apocryphal and independently confirmed stories of people dying within the day or less of exposure. Most ghastily, those of vigorous and energetic dispositions were the most likely to be struck down due to having too good of an immune system.

When those isolated villages did get infected, the death rates were Ebola-like virgin-field levels. It's one of the nastiest plagues of history. The main problem is that social breakdown was very close to happening in some parts, and that causes even highly infectious airborne diseases to damper down.

One way to wank it would be for the previous type of flu (H3N2 I think) to also have really bad year rather than simply disappearing. Few realize that fully 30-40K Americans die every year from the flu even now and in a bad year, the number's closer to 70-80K. If you get a bad round of H3N2 after you've been severely weakened by the Spanish flu, it's conceivable that the mortality rate among the old and infants would collectively skyrocket as a side effect.
 
Mother Nature really missed an opportunity to completely screwover the human race in 1917-1918 - so your challenge is to pick up the slack so-to-speak.

With any post-1900 PoD - your job is to wank Spanish Influenza pandemic as much as possible.

Bonus points of your roughly describe its political effects on the world in the aftermath.
Put a moderately sized Japanese contingent on the ground on the western front. Give it a much better chance of catching on in Japan when infected come back from war. Same with a few south American countries. A division each might do.
 
didn't ian have a sticky up against this type of threads?
Not really - i believe its for threads that are pointlessly morbid / death heavy... imho nothing wrong with threads like this so long as its for a purpose / reasonable discussion. Hopefully the mods agree lol.
 

CalBear

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Mass death scenarios for shits & giggles are NOT acceptable here.
 
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