Just over a hundred years ago, a deadly pandemic swept across the face of planet Earth,

killing anywhere between 20 and 100 million people.

Potentially far more than the Great War immediately preceding it.

Yet, until recently, this was a forgotten pandemic, downplayed by governments and media outlets

all over the world, known as the Spanish flu, simply because the Republican leadership

in Spain at the time continued to report on it when other governments refused.

It's only in the last few decades that the sheer scale and historical significance of such an outbreak

has been realised, potentially having just as much impact on humanity as the First World War.

Like earlier pandemics in history, all the way back to the plague of Athens, the Antonine

plague, the Plague of Justinian, and most famously the Black Death.

This was a deadly disease, particularly for people who had almost no knowledge of how to fight it,

killing off huge swathes of the population.

Between 1918 and 1920, somewhere between a half and two-thirds of the world's population were infected,

with an indiscriminate death rate of around 5%.

Nowhere near that of the Black Death, but enough all the same.

In the much more interconnected world of the 20th century, the young affected just as much as the old. On a whole, the majority of people survived, which is precisely why the disease was so deadly,

allowing it to spread to every corner of the globe.

Yet, after the mass graves were filled, after each one of these deadly plagues in history

subsided, the people returned, picked up where they'd left off, recovered, sometimes finding

themselves in much better positions than they'd been in before.

After the Black Death in the 14th century, the peasantry in England, fewer in numbers

and higher in demand got a new lease on social mobility. For some historians, paving the

...