The first significant attempt to quantify the death toll came in 1927. An American Medical Association–sponsored study estimated that 21 million died. When today’s media refers to a death toll of “more than 20 million” in stories on the 1918 pandemic, the source is this study. But every revision of the deaths since 1927 has been upward. The U.S. death toll was originally put at 550,000. Now epidemiologists have settled on 675,000 out of a population of 105 million. In the year 2004, the U.S. population exceeds 291 million.
