How does Coronavirus (Covid-19) compare to Spanish flu?

there is a saying which goes a bit like this the man that looks to the past and the future is blind in one eye but no man who looks to the future only is blind in both although this is something which we should heed at all times in the case of a current coronavirus it is particularly relevant because with the advantage of hindsight we can see where we made big mistakes in the past either from just sheer lack of knowledge at the time or from some misguided belief er to covering things up for whatever reason will somehow make it less of an issue something which continues in places around the world today so with the biggest worldwide response to a pandemic in a hundred years how does the corona virus or covered 19 compared to the last truly global pandemic of Spanish flu from 1918 to 1920 [Music] [Applause] [Music] now even with the worldwide concern over the coronavirus there are still people out there saying that seasonal flu kills far more people after 650,000 worldwide every year which is true and we aren't making a big fuss about that but to coin a phrase that's because it's one of the known unknowns we know it will happen every year and we are prepared for it even both some years are worse than others when something like covered 19 comes along pretty much right out of the blue and into a population with no immunity it's highly contagious and has a death rate of at least 20 times that of flu then we have the makings of a major problem especially with cheap air travel around the world it can spread faster now than it ever could have done in the past as we have seen with China Italy and now other countries a large sudden spike in cases requiring hospitalization can almost crash even the best health services not to mention the associated economic damage of a shutdown required to contain the outbreak which in all probability will push the world into a recession so reacting quickly with the best practices known at the time becomes essential even Bovo virus can't be stopped everywhere the worst effects can hopefully be mitigated we haven't seen a major pandemic in living memory there have been many more localized epidemics involving various strains of flu other corona viruses including SARS and MERS both of which are more deadly than covered 19 and leaders deadliest of them all Ebola we have to go back just over 100 years to 1918 to see the world's last truly global pandemic if we exclude bubonic plague from the Middle Ages Spanish flu as it became known was the worst health crisis in recorded history infecting somewhere around 30% of the venn world population of about 1.8 billion people and killing somewhere between 17 250 million all around the globe this stands as a solemn reminder of what can happen when a pandemic gets truly out of control of course the circumstances were very different back then when the Spanish flu pandemic struck in 1918 World War one was still raging and there was only a very rudimentary knowledge of the viruses and the diseases they caused we now know that Spanish flu was an outbreak of the h1n1 influenza virus a type of virus that is common in birds and mammals like pigs which is white sometimes called bird flu or swine flu it's believed to have jumped the species gap through close contact with infected animals in the food chain its exact beginnings are unknown some believe it originated in China and then mutated at the u.s. military camp in Kansas before being spread to a British Army Hospital in France and onto the front line others say that it had been circulating in the European armies for maybe a year or more before it being noted at the British Army Hospital in 1918 whichever way to curd from there on in and after the war ended soldiers returning to their home countries spread the infection to the rest of Europe the US and the British Empire countries before it eventually spread to every inhabited continent in the world even in the wilds of Alaska and the islands in the middle of the Pacific there were recorded deaths due to Spanish flu but this is where things are different to the common coronavirus of coughing nineteen firstly the two viruses are not the same Spanish flu was an influenza virus and Kovach 19 is a corona virus genetically related to but not the same as the SARS virus of 2000 to 2003 so it's not a flu virus even though some of the symptoms are quite similar all over common cold is also a corona virus it is much much less than these newly emergent zoonotic viruses like MERS SARS and now covered 19 these have jumped from animals to humans in a very short space of time and because of this we have no natural or built up immunity to them the problem we now face is that in about 80% of the covered 19 cases the symptoms are mild and with many people facing financial hardship due to the measures taken to counter the outbreak they could be a fair number of them still at work or out and about spreading the virus this means that the other 20% will need some sort of care or hospitalization and if a large number become infected it becomes a numbers game with far more people than there are beds or ventilators available which is what we are now seeing with all the knock-on effects to other people in the Health Service - back in 1918 the coinciding of the outbreak of Spanish flu with the last year of a war was also instrumental to the spread of a disease as news about it was suppressed by the u.s. British French and Germans for fear that it might compromise morale and show weakness to the enemy which could be very excited militarily Spain was neutral during the war and had no such restrictions on reporting of the outbreak and thus it became known as Spanish flu simply because they were the only ones reporting it openly this suppression of information allowed it to spread far more quickly than it would've if more people had known about it at the time the general health and hygiene of much of a population was also much lower than it is now there was much more poverty and malnutrition especially in Germany which had been blockaded by the British Navy since the beginning of the war and by 1918 this was causing a major hardship to the German people with shortages of fuel and food these alone led to dramatic increases in diseases caused by malnutrition scurvy tuberculosis and dysentery and also added to the increased likelihood of people become infected with the flow due to weakened immune systems although Spanish flu and covered 19 are different viruses they both attack the lungs in a more aggressive way than seasonal flu Spanish flu was different to seasonal flu because it affected normally fit people in their 20s to 40s basically the age of the average soldier in the war rather than a very young or very old of normal flu in many of the fatalities what is now known as a cytokine storm occurred this is where the body's own immune system and it's activating compounds of the cytokines flood the lungs instead of just the areas where the virus is located the result is the lungs are damaged by the immune system leading to much greater information and fluid buildup and allowing secondary bacterial pneumonia to take hold now Kovac 19 is said to affect mostly the old and those with underlying health issues with data from China showing but very few children under the age of 14 being seriously affected but that doesn't mean but younger people from the age of 15 to 50 aren't as likely to be severely affected by it covered 19 is also much more contagious than flu with each covered 19 suffer infecting two to three others where a seasonal flu sufferers infect only 1.3 people information from Italy and China is showing that in the most serious cases of covered 19 the virus attacks four lungs aggressively creating a large amount of inflammation and fluid buildup leading to secondary bacterial pneumonia it's also been found that the virus attacks the heart directly meaning that anyone with a heart problem whether they know about it or not is at a greater risk of a heart attack as well as severely reduced lung function the cytokine storms which were major killers in the Spanish flu are also common in the worst cases of covered 19 and if left untreated are usually fatal fortunately over the last two decades and since SARS much has been learned about how to diagnose and treat cytokine storms but it requires medical professionals to be aware of it and to identify quickly those who have survived the worst cases of Kovac 19 are often found to have been left with lung damage from the scarring of the virus itself and also the overreaction of the immune system this brings us onto the mortality rate for Spanish flu it appears to have been around 2.5 percent compared to normal flu about Northpointe 1% has 25 times more deadly in a report from a Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention the link is in the description if you want to view it which looked at forty two thousand six hundred and seventy two confirmed cases found that the more tidy rate of Kovac 19 was 2.3 percent or roughly similar to Spanish flu this means that Kovac 19 is 23 times more deadly than seasonal flu this 2.3 percent mortality rate was across all ranges from 15 upwards but above 80 it climbs to 14 point 8 percent as to those who get seriously ill and those who don't depends pretty much on how the individual reacts to the virus rather than what age they are an old fit person with no health issues might have a mild infection whereas an unfit younger person with health issues could be very seriously ill the figures are skewed for the over 80s because they are far more likely to have underlying health issues so how did the Spanish flu outbreak end well he didn't just fade away after the initial wave a second much more deadly mutation spread in France the US and Sierra Leone a British protectorate at the time it's thought that during the initial wave civilians who fell seriously ill stayed indoors and those were the milder form carried on in normal life spreading a milder form of flute however for soldiers at the front the opposite was true those with a mild version stayed at the front whilst those with the most severe form were sent back taking the more mutation with them to spread it into the hospitals and on to other new troops which were arriving this is something that virologist look out for in outbreaks today because if a virus reaches places where there is large-scale social upheaval then there is a greater chance for a more deadly mutant strain to develop in the end Spanish flu peaked in October 1918 with cases dropping off abruptly in the following month though it spread carried on more slowly around the world to 1920 the reason for this is believed that the most severe form killed many of those infected and thus it died with them another common occurrence is that flu viruses often mutate rapidly becoming less lethal in the process we still don't know how covered 19 will react or mutate in the long run and that even after containment measures are ended that it won't bounce back with even greater severity we will only know this in the fullness of time over the years since World War one much more emphasis was placed on the casualties of the war rather than Spanish flu and the deadliest pandemic since the bubonic plague and the probably killed many more people than the war itself was mostly forgotten about more recently since the outbreak of SARS and MERS the far more deadly versions of corona virus there has been a new interest in how and why the Spanish flu spread so widely and was so deadly so as to I understand what might happen in a future pandemic like we are having now it's being said many times that a new global pandemic is just a matter of when rather than if but we live in a world that is interconnected in ways which would have been unimaginable back in 1918 with far better knowledge and ability to fight the virus so it's almost impossible that the results would be the same but this is still going to pose the biggest health crisis with all the knock-on effects that we have seen in our lifetimes

Channel: Curious Droid

Views: 929,382

Rating: 4.9015198 out of 5

Keywords: spanish flu, covid 19, flu, pandemic, paul shillito, curious droid, coronavirus, h1n1, virus spread, 1918

Id: VJrm8V5KmPs

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/COOLSerdash]

A minor correction: COVID-19 (corona virus disease 2019) is the disease that is caused by the virus which is called SARS-CoV-2. COVID-19 is not the virus itself. An analogy would be AIDS which is the disease caused by the HI-Virus (HIV).