A decade after the pandemic, a careful and comprehensive scientific review of findings and statistics not only in the United States but around the world confirmed, “In the later stages of the epidemic the supposedly characteristic influenza lesions were less frequently found, the share of secondary invaders was more plainly recognizable, and the differences of locality were sharply marked. . . . [I]n 1919 the ‘water-logged’ lungs”—those in which death came quickly from ARDS—“were relatively rarely encountered.”
