How Tuberculosis Fueled the 1918 Flu and Covid-19 Pandemics

A consensus review by experts across the globe admits the role of TB in viral respiratory infections.

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TB and 1918 Flu in the US

The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic infected about one-third of the global population (500 million people) and claimed at least 50 million lives. In the United States alone, about 675,000 died from it within a year. But this high death toll might not be from the influenza virus alone.

“Now a researcher in demography at the University of California, Berkeley, has evidence that undetected tuberculosis, or TB, actually may have caused much of the mortality in 1918,” the university’s news media said. That researcher is Andrew Noymer, an associate professor of public health. In his landmark 2000 review and 2011 statistical papers, he outlined many uncanny links between the 1918 flu and TB in the US:

• The 500,000 deaths of the 1918 flu were nearly identical to the number of people that would have succumbed to TB if the pandemic never appeared.
• “Just after 1918, TB death rates experience their steepest decline of the century,” he wrote. This decline was more extreme for males. The 1918 flu also disproportionately killed males. And TB is a…