Quote Originally Posted by Ziggurat View Post
The reason we don't treat flu every year as a pandemic is that no new (novel) strain has arisen. The last time a new strain arose was in 1918. 50,000,000 people died from it. Compare that to the 290,000 deaths WHO quoted above. You can compare covid with the 1918 flu, but you can't compare it with the present day flu. To repeat: a pandemic disease is different.
To repeat: that wasn't the point but to rebut the claim in bold:-

"Five flu pandemics have occurred since 1900: the Spanish flu in 1918–1920, which was the most severe flu pandemic, the Asian flu in 1957, the Hong Kong flu in 1968, the Russian flu in 1977, and the swine flu pandemic in 2009." - Wikipedia.