Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mrguyorama 1062 days ago
Bacterial Pneumonia was not the novel danger of the "Spanish" flu; They cytokine storm it caused in perfectly healthy people was horrifying, with perfectly healthy people who would normally fight off any flu dying from this one. A lot of young twenty somethings, strong people who were not malnourished died from it.

Hell, people got cytokine storms from COVID-19 and we still can only treat it if we catch it really early, otherwise it's still a great way to die for a normal person.

1 comments

That's a hypothesis. It is known that (supposedly) that strain can cause cytokine storm more than other flus do. I would not assume that means cytokine storm was the primary cause of death or even the primary cause of death in young adults. Based on my experience my guess is that the pneumonia was a much bigger cause of death than the storm
Right I wasn't expressing the cytokine storm as the primary cause of death but rather a phenomenon that definitely pushed it above a normal flu, especially for healthy young adults.