> which has not yet resulted in even 200k deaths

It's almost certainly resulted in a larger number than that already.

Estimating the true number of people who have already died of COVID-19 is difficult.

I've seen estimates ranging from 15% more to 4x more than the "confirmed" figure, which itself has increased from 100,000 to ~190,000 over the last 2 weeks.

That's the number of "confirmed" deaths, by some meaning of confirmed. Some of the contributing figures only counting people in hospital at the time of death, and even that with a significant time delay.

I have an 80yo friend who lived though both of those pandemics and says that the 1957 one was terrifying in the UK. It hit nursing staff very quickly and hard, many hospitals were running below half-staff. It was the first pandemic of the air-travel era and spread like wildfire.

But until this latest pandemic arose he hadn't even mentioned his experience, it was just considered part of life. And unless you know to look for it, it's barely mentioned in modern history.

Yeah, I'm surprised how little these are mentioned, especially in the context of the current pandemic.

Yes, but apparently that is already too far gone for anyone to remember and not hard enough to hit all history books...

I think another factor is that there wasn't the internet back then. Information about the viruses would've been spreading a lot less rapidly than information about covid-19 has been. Overall, I think even at the time people were probably less informed about what was going on (and the global context of it) than we now are.