Editorial
Maia Goncalves A, Maia Gonç
Abstract
A few months ago, a new virus emerged in the province of Wuhan in China and spread at a pandemic dimension to reach, at the present date (third week of July 2020), more than 14 million people and killing more than 600 000 people in over 210 countries of all continents. The world has experienced other pandemics and in our collective memory remains the ghost of the Spanish flu which extended the devastation caused by the Great War in a deadlier fashion than the present situation, affecting 500 million people (1/3 of the world wide population of that time), the estimate being of at least 50 million mortal victims. In the USA alone, 650 000 deaths were recorded. To emphasize the dimension of the horrific effect of the Spanish flu, the dead in the Great War were 9 million among the military and 7 million among civilians