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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7941162" data-attributes="member: 4937">Influenza's mortality rate depends heavily on how much the population is exposed to, and at least partially immune, to different strains of the virus. Related viruses can appear over a period of many years, and impart immunity to similar viruses that are of a very different character.Overall mortality in the 1918 Spanish Flu - which is believed by some to also be an H1N1 variant - was about 2%. That virus had a nearly unique trait of killing the young and healthy at relatively high rates and higher rates than those just younger or older than they were - peaking at age 25 at about 1% mortality. But it was actually less lethal overall for the elderly than most seasonal flu. Some believe it was because the very old had been exposed to H1N1 before.It also had the unusual trait of killing people in rural areas at higher rates than urban areas.My family at the time was living in the southern part of Arkansas (a state in America).  In the rural community that they lived in, the death rate among those about age 25 hit 20% of the population.   Old people in wagons and those that had survived would go house to house in winter, and people would leave their corpses on the porch to be picked up and buried, because they were too sick to attend a funeral.</blockquote>