US top infectious disease specialist, Anthony Fauci, on Tuesday said that coronavirus a pandemic of "historic proportions" has the potential to be as serious as the 1918 Spanish Flu in which over 50 million people globally died.
"I think we can't deny that fact," CNN quoted Fauci as saying during a Georgetown University Global Health Initiative webinar. "If you look at the magnitude of the 1918 pandemic where anywhere from 50 to 75 to 100 million people globally died, that was the mother of all pandemics and truly historic. I hope we don't even approach that with this, but it does have the makings of, the possibility of ... approaching that in seriousness." The Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, the deadliest in history, infected an estimated 500 million people worldwide--about one-third of the planet's population.
