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Estimating the lethal impact of a pandemic on a religious community with significant barriers to outsiders can be exceedingly difficult. Nevertheless, Stein and colleagues (2021) developed an innovative means of arriving at such an estimate for the lethal impact of COVID-19 on the Amish community in 2020 by counting user-generated death reports in the widely circulated Amish periodical The Budget. By comparing monthly averages of reported deaths before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, Stein and colleagues were able to arrive at a rough estimate of "excess deaths" during the first year of the pandemic. Our research extends the same research method, applying it to the years during and immediately preceding the global influenza pandemic of 1918. Results show similarly robust findings, including three notable "waves" of excess deaths among Amish and conservative Mennonites in the USA in 1918, 1919, and 1920. Such results point to the promise of utilizing religious periodicals like The Budget as a relatively untapped trove of user-generated data on public health outcomes among religious minorities more than a century in the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1918 "Spanish flu" was the fastest spreading and most deadly influenza pandemic in recorded history. Hypotheses of its origin have been based on a limited collection of case and outbreak reports from before its recognized European emergence in the summer of 1918. These anecdotal accounts, however, remain insufficient for determining the early diffusion and impact of the pandemic virus. Using routinely collected monthly age-stratified mortality data, we show that an unmistakable shift in the age distribution of epidemic deaths occurred during the 1917/1918 influenza season in New York City. The timing, magnitude, and age distribution of this mortality shift provide strong evidence that an early wave of the pandemic virus was present in New York City during February-April 1918. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies argue that major crises can have long-lasting effects on individual behavior. While most studies focused on natural disasters, we explore the consequences of the global pandemic caused by a lethal influenza virus in 1918-19: the so-called "Spanish Flu." This was by far the worst pandemic of modern history, causing up to 100 million deaths worldwide. Using information about attitudes of respondents to the General Social Survey, we find evidence that experiencing the pandemic likely had permanent consequences in terms of individuals' social trust. Our findings suggest that lower social trust was passed on to the descendants of the survivors of the Spanish Flu who migrated to the United States. As trust is a crucial factor for long-term economic development, our research offers a new angle from which to assess current health threats., (© 2021 The Authors. Health Economics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)