Do your know why the Spanish Flu was called this way ? Because Spain was one of the few countries not involved in WWI, and then didn't had the strong level of censorship that was ubiquitous at this time.
Pressure to obfuscate the impact of the epidemic where way higher then.
Yes but we know quite a lot about its spread and impact now. This is like the fog of war, its hard to see what is happening while a battle is underway but afterward many different accounts can be pieced together to gain an accurate understanding of what happened.
Pressure to obfuscate the impact of the epidemic where way higher then.