Covid-19 has caused millions of deaths worldwide.
It has been more than two years since the world has dealt with the coronavirus pandemic. Since 2019, there have been successive waves of infection with devastating consequences for the population. Some of these waves were found to be more deadly in a few countries where the Covid-19 infection caused a large number of fatalities and strained healthcare infrastructure.
Since Covid-19 struck, scientists around the world have been looking for examples to help them anticipate the future of the infectious disease. As part of this global effort, they are investigating a respiratory disease that afflicted Russia more than 130 years ago.
This mysterious illness, dubbed the “Russian flu,” may have been caused by a virus similar to SARS-COV-2, the scientists claim, according to a DailyExpertNews report.
The illness of May 1889 swept across the world, overwhelming hospitals and killing the elderly with particular cruelty. Schools and colleges were forced to close, and those infected reported loss of taste and smell — much like today’s pandemic.
Drawing further parallels with more than a century-old wave of infection, the scientists further told NYT that some of the recovered patients reported persistent exhaustion and that the flu finally ended after three waves of infection.
This behavior leads to speculation among the scientific community that the ‘Russian flu’ was indeed caused by the coronavirus.
“Maybe I would say,” said Dr. Tom Ewing of Virginia Tech, a historian who has studied the Russian flu. Others say the current pandemic is expected to end in a similar way.
But some historians say there is no hard data to support the hypothesis. “There is very little, almost no hard data on the flu pandemic in Russia,” Yale’s Frank Snowden told the NYT.
Professor Marc Van Ranst from Belgium, an expert on coronaviruses, echoed similar sentiments, but added that SARS-COV-2 could become a continuously circulating or “endemic” virus. Speaking to the EU research and innovation magazine Horizon, he pointed to the evolution of OC43, a coronavirus that may have jumped from cows to humans in 1890 and caused severe colds.
Professor Ranst said pandemics like the ‘Russian flu’ were happening all the time “but we didn’t notice them”. He said the spread of the infection took time at the time due to fewer resources. But now research has picked up speed and scientists are trying to learn from past experience, he added.
There have been other pandemics over the past 100 years that scientists are looking at to find clues to the end of Covid-19. One such pandemic dates back to 1918, which declined after three waves of infection, but the virus, H1N1, remained in circulation in a less virulent form until 1957, when it disappeared.
Then H2N2 came out. It was substantially different from H1N1 and caused a pandemic. That pattern was repeated with the emergence of H3N2 in 1968.
But in 1977, H1N1 came back. Together with another virus, H3N2, they have been circulating ever since.
This is a mystery the scientists are trying to solve, Dr. David Morens, a flu researcher, told NYT.
The current wave of Covid-19 is being led by the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, which has been labeled a “variant of concern” by the World Health Organization (WHO). Many of its sub-variants are also being monitored as humans navigate a difficult third year of the pandemic.
