Loss of taste and smell is a symptom of respiratory and neurological symptoms.
Long-haul sufferers have trouble returning to work.
The elderly and obese are the targets of the pandemic.
Sounds a lot like COVID, right?
It's not.
The Russian Flu is the world's first well-documented pandemic, occurring as modern germ theory rose to prominence and miasma theory was dispelled.
A quick check of the textbooks will show you that the Pandemic, which killed an estimated 1 million worldwide, lasted from 1889 to 1890.
Experts will tell you that it was likely around for a long time.
The Russian Flu probably wasn't a flu at all before the Spanish Flu of 1918 killed 50 million people.
COVID-19 is a member of a group of viruses called coronaviruses, which are named for their appearance under a microscope.
A few common colds are caused by coronaviruses, which cause mild to moderate upper-respiratory infections in humans. An epidemic that killed hundreds in 2002 and another that killed hundreds in 2012 are some of the deadly ones.
The epidemiology and clinical symptoms of the Russian Flu are more in line with COVID than what we know about the flu.
There are strong neurologic symptoms when you have the Russian Flu and Long COVID. The people were unable to return to full work capacity due to an increase in suicide rate.
It makes one think that one is dealing with a coronaviruses in the 1800s.
The so-called Russian Flu was a coronaviruses. Does it serve as a better way to view the current epidemic than the Spanish Flu? What lessons can we learn? Does it offer any clues as to how the COVID-19 epidemic might end?
If we say the Russian Flu went extinct, the odds are much lower for COVID.
We are past that point.
The forgotten.
When nobody dared to predict the trajectory of the COVID pandemic, how it will develop or end, and looking to glimpse into a COVID-19 crystal.
What is the best paradigm for COVID? He first looked at the Spanish Flu, but it was different. The Russian Flu was the next chronological option, and the first one for which data was collected, but he was limited in what he could do.
It was a great fit.
The Russian Flu was the best case I could find of a respiratory epidemic of a similar size to COVID that was medically documented.
While considered a flu at the time, scientists did not yet have a solid grasp on what caused disease, with germ theory arising nearly simultaneously and duking it out with the miasma theory, the pre-scientific notion that disease was caused by bad air.
In one of his articles on the ailment, Bruessow refers to a report from 1891 London, which describes Russian Flu patients as suffering from a hard, dry cough.
If children fell ill at all, they were spared, often only mildly affected. Those who were elderly were more likely to take a fatal course than those with pre-existing conditions.
Nearly 10% of cases saw continued symptoms, referred to by European doctors of the time as long enduring evil effects.
The case of a patient who fell ill with the flu in December 1889 in France, and then again a month later, was noted as an example of how infectious patients are before they develop symptoms.
The Russian Flu was an apt comparison for the first three months of the COVID pandemic due to its quick spread and global efforts to track symptoms, according to Dr. Tom Ewing, a history professor and associate dean at Virginia Tech who has published extensively on the topic.
The Spanish Flu is thought to have killed 650,000 people in the U.S. in eight months, and COVID has killed nearly a million in the U.S. The Russian Flu is thought to have killed a million people.
How do people respond to first reports is where the useful comparisons are. How do doctors deal with a new scale of disease? At what point do you say it is all over?
Is the Russian Flu still a killer?
The Russian Flu lasted through 1894, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine. According to public health data from the United Kingdom, there were major mortality peaks through 1899 or 1900, and they were nearly as high as they were during the first phase of the Russian Flu.
It is not known if the deaths were from the Russian Flu or something else. There are reports of symptoms from potential later waves in The Lancet and other British medical journals.
The possibility that the Russian Flu agent was evolving and causing a major mortality peak in the United Kingdom and elsewhere makes me think that we should consider that.
OC43, a common human coronaviruses that can cause upper-respiratory track illness, is believed to be the cause of the Russian Flu, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The pathogen is known to cause bronchitis, bronchiolitis, and pneumonia in children and the elderly, as well as immunosuppressed patients, and its presentation may be easily confused with that of COVID-19.
The Russian Flu is thought to exist because scientists realized how similar OC43 is to bovine coronaviruses.
If they are correct, the Russian Flu is still circulating, and it can be deadly, according to a study published in Nature.
The Russian Flu may be killing people off, and we are just not paying attention to it.
There is a lot of dark matter in the infectious disease world that we haven't fully mapped out.
Such a future could be waiting for COVID, according to Bruessow.
He said that the potential of COVID to persist well into the future is what virologists working in the viral evolution field think.
The Russian Flu lasted about three years, but Bruessow hopes Omicron is the last hoorah.
He said that he was a bit skeptical that Omicron would be the end of this.
If the Russian Flu still exists today in a form that is milder for most, it doesn't mean we won't see a major COVID resurgence down the road.
He cautioned that it was a little risky to generalize from that, because at the time they didn't have vaccinations or public health measures.
OC43 could someday be more of a problem, and that's what Chakravarty wondered.
He said that it is entirely possible. We don't know much about OC 43.
There is no reason to think that COVID-19 will become less severe over time, just as there is no reason to think that the virus will increase in severity.
The evolution of the virus is neutral with respect to virulence.
Increasing transmission is the dynamic we are seeing. There is no guarantee that the next wave won't be a virus with increased virulence like Delta.
For more than a century.
The body count can still pile up over several years, even if a disease isn't incredibly transmissible and has a relatively low fatality rate, as was the case with the Russian Flu.
He said thatmortality bounced around.
The world is much better connected than it was in the industrial era, allowing for greater ease of disease spread.
It has a high transmission rate and is nearly as infectious as the mumps, he warned.
You can sneeze in the morning in Wuhan and someone can get sick the next day in Frankfurt.
The last mention of the illness in medical literature was the Russian Flu wave of 1900. The Spanish Flu of 1918 was the beginning of major respiratory pandemics that were all related to the flu.
There is no indication of a coronaviruses causing a major epidemic in the 20th century.
It is possible that coronaviruses continued to circulate throughout the 20th century but was less significant due to improvements in public health and quality of life.
During the early 20th century, health was getting better, mortality rates were decreasing, and life expectancy was going up.
The Spanish Flu may not be the best way to view COVID-19, but it does contain important lessons.
The Spanish Flu is thought to have subsided in 1919 after three waves, but later waves occurred in the late 1920s and 1940s, with even higher mortality, he contends.
Descendants of the H1N1 flu virus that caused the 1918-1919 epidemic are not appreciated by most people.
They pointed out that the H1N1 flu was derived from two unrelated swine viruses, one of which was a descendant of the 1918 human virus.
13 years ago, they wrote that we are living in a Pandemic era that began around 1918.
Fauci and his colleagues agree thatviruses do not simply disappear.
There are still some escapes and we might see a return with higher virulence.
One can't draw too many inferences from any particular pandemic, regardless of similarities, but that is what Chakravarty cautions against.
He said that each new plague is a new chapter in the history books.
One thing is constant.
There isn't a two-year timeline for Pandemics, he warned.
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