> “At the time of a pandemic, there is always an assertion that it’s a great equalizer, that the wealthy will be dropping to the same degree as the poor. And in retrospect, that is never true,” says Rachel Mason Dentinger, a historian of biology and medicine and an assistant professor at the University of Utah. “What emerges every time is that social determinants of health play a huge role in how diseases affect people disproportionately.”
The tldr here is that they looked for people in the sample who's bones had evidence of wear that would normally be fixed in "healthy" people. They found some, a bit more than expected for the sample size. What it does not say is anything about age or anything about healthy people not also dying. What this paper suggests is that the 1918 influenza a H1N1 killed a lot of people who were unhealthy too.<p>And the idea that Cleveland only had one 7 month long wave of 1918 H1N1 is also ... a big leap not really supported.<p>It's too bad the actual paper is behind a paywall. You can never tell what is a wired journalist misunderstanding and what's actually in the paper.
Evaluating the truthiness of journalism today forces me to distrust history as a whole.<p>Whatever the history books say happened is what didn't happen.