2026/07/01 by Madeleine Mant, Taylor P. van Doren, Lisa Sattenspiel
paper · doi:10.1002/ajhb.70310
ABSTRACT Objectives Research surrounding the 1918 influenza pandemic has primarily been a story of mortality despite theoretical and practical reasons to focus on the pandemic's long‐term impacts. We investigate survivorship among individuals who were hospitalized with influenza and pneumonia (P&I) before and during the 1918 flu to explore morbidity and understand the effects of viral pandemic illness on long‐term individual health. Materials and Methods We synthesize a novel dataset of hospitalization records from St. John's General Hospital in Newfoundland & Labrador with vital records to calculate survivorship beyond hospitalization with P&I from a non‐pandemic period (1914–1917) and the 1918 flu period (1918–1920) (total n = 127). We use a Kaplan–Meier log‐rank test to identify differences in cumulative survivorship and a Cox proportional hazards model to predict survivorship controlling for period, length of hospitalization, and age at hospitalization (ɑ = 0.10). Results Kaplan–Meier results indicate no significant differences in survival probability between the two time periods (non‐pandemic vs. pandemic P&I, p = 0.12). Cox proportional hazards results support this observation (HR for pandemic hospitalizations = 0.8, p = 0.32). The number of days spent hospitalized (HR = 1.01, p = 0.096) and age at hospitalization (HR = 1.05, p Conclusion This innovative research investigating morbidity as well as mortality during pandemic events links individual pandemic survivors with their long‐term mortality data. The results speak to the complex nature of tracing individual and population health outcomes over time.