Short‐ and medium‐run health and literacy impacts of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic in Brazil
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We study the lasting repercussions of the 1918 influenza (‘Spanish Flu’) pandemic on health measures and literacy rates in São Paulo, Brazil, the most populous city in South America today, but significantly poorer a century ago. Leveraging temporal and spatial variation in district‐level estimates of influenza‐related deaths for the 1917–20 time period, combined with a unique database on demographic and literacy outcomes as well as a detailed set of socio‐economic, infrastructure, and regional determinants newly constructed from historical data, we find that the pandemic had significant impacts. In particular, infant mortality and stillbirths rose, sex ratios at birth fell, and there was a marked improvement in male literacy rates for those 15 years and above in 1920. Further analyses reveal that these impacts are most pronounced in districts with older populations, less literate districts, and districts where access to doctors was relatively limited. We find evidence that the male literacy effects persist in 1940. These results highlight that ramifications of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic were experienced for at least two decades after the event in a context where institutions were relatively weak and resources for mitigation were limited.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".