Some attributed it to Russian soldiers arriving from Vladivostok. Some doctors maintained that the influenza was introduced into Europe by Chinese labor battalions that landed on the coast of France. Traditionally Asia has been the matrix of disease, as if there were a permanent focus of infection that existed in the vastness of Mongolia from where it would erupt periodically into the rest of the world. The 1918 influenza followed this pattern, reaching America last. Through centuries the course of epidemics has run from east to west. India, China, Persia, and South Africa were infected earlier. By the end of October it had spread all over Europe and North America and many parts of South America. It was the tremendous sweep of the disease that made the death totals so large. Unlike the Black Death, which killed nine out of ten, and cholera, which took four out of five, the 1918 influenza was fatal to only about three or four percent of those who came down with it. In the United States half a million died. More were dead in India in a few months than in twenty years of cholera. All in all it killed 22,000,000 people, almost twice as many as the war itself. A quarter of the world’s population was affected. Only the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death can compare with it. Though it now seems merely an episode in the last year of the First World War, the influenza of the autumn of 1918 was one of the three greatest outbreaks of disease in history.
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