When you said "influenza" in 1918, what you were talking about was bacteria. The 1918 influenza pandemic was called that
because using the microscopes they had at the time, they diagnosed patients with bacillus influenzae infections, with the
bacteria clearly visible on slides of samples taken from patients.
It was only after viruses were discovered that doctors decided it would be a good idea for them
to co-opt the "influenza" name, and
call a virus causing cold-like symptoms the "influenza virus",
thus changing public perception of the pandemic after the fact.
More recent studies of the 1918 Pandemic have shown that most of the deaths
were in fact due to what they refer to as
bacterial superinfections,
meaning bacterial infections developed on top of influenza virus infections.
Bacterial infections can only be transferred in close quarters with other infected individuals,
as patients were consistently exposed to when going to crowded makeshift hospitals.
The result was the outsized number of deaths, which were, as correctly diagnosed at the time with microscopes,
due to bacterial pneumonia, and thus,
Hospital-Acquired Pneumonia, or HAP.
Although antibiotics were developed a decade after the 1918 Pandemic, they are very inexact tools.
Antibiotics have to be closely targeted to the type of infection they are trying to address,
and even then, complications can arise from other infections or conditions, and over time,
drug-resistant bacteria develops.
Today, Hospital-Acquired Pneumonia is the primary cause of death in intensive-care units.
So, antibiotics did not cure Hospital-Acquired Pneumonia - it remains as big a threat today as it did back in 1918,
and in many ways may be worse, as more invasive procedures such as ventilation have become common, leading to
deadly bacteria
being deeply embedded into lung tissue.
