I talked to a guy who was the grandson of a neighborhood funeral home owner. He said his grandfather told him during the Spanish flu epidemic, they were doing 150 funerals a week! Multiply that by a couple hundred funeral homes to get some idea of how hard that flu hit.
Caring for the dead
My father had the 1918-1919 flu, His favorite brother, Ralph died of it, he himself was in bed and even comatose for a while. Took him about 4 months. I am named after Ralph.
675,000 American died of it, some estimates say 20,000,000 people worldwide.
Funny, most virologists think it started in America at the Army bases in Kansas, where large amounts of men were crowded together. Maybe mutated once or twice before destroying what remained of europe’s armies.