Having become number one news, the coronavirus continues its journey around the world, creating serious excitement and anxiety around people. And although it is currently impossible to predict how the global pandemic will end, based on the experience of previous years, one can safely assume about the possible end of COVID-19. Oddly enough, but delving into the history of the spread of the world famous “Spanish flu”, one can understand that the most massive influenza pandemic in history has some common features with modern coronavirus infection. How, at first glance, two completely different viruses that broke out at different periods in the development of medicine can have anything in common? Let's try to figure it all out in this article.
How is Spanish flu similar to coronavirus?
The current outbreak of COVID-19 can have many options for the development of events, both positive and negative. If you use the experience of past years, you can understand that the occurrence of some negative events can be tried to prevent only by taking into account the experience of generations of the past. To do this, you can try to go back to 1918, when the whole world was swallowed by the deadly influenza virus, which went down in history as the “Spanish flu”. In order to estimate the scale of the pandemic, it is enough to know that in the first 25 weeks after the onset of the infection, about 25 million people died.
The difficult post-war years, unsanitary conditions and poor nutrition helped the virus spread to many countries and gain global proportions, but the influenza virus, familiar to many of us as the H1N1 virus, turned out to be a real supervirus of that time. It should be noted that even now he is quite dangerous, having become the culprit of the outbreak of "swine" flu in 2009.
During the raging Spanish flu, not only the elderly and those with weakened immune systems died, but also the young and completely healthy. Almost lightning-fast death of a person occurred due to the fact that the lungs of the infected were filled with liquid, as a result of which the person literally drowned without water. Fortunately for all of us, the modern coronavirus does not cause such dire consequences.
Until now, few people know that the Spanish flu first appeared not in Spain at all, but in America in 1917. As well as COVID-19, the Spanish flu virus mutated and began to partially spread along with the troops during the First World War, according to the portal Mashable.com. In just a year of its existence, the virus managed to kill more people than even the war itself did.
The main mistake in the spread of the Spanish flu was the prolonged suppression of the facts due to hostilities.
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During the war between the countries of Europe, the influenza virus spread quite quickly, and since the military censorship of that time could not leak information about the epidemic that had begun inside the country, the authorities for a long time kept silent about the real state of affairs. For example, the death of a huge number of people could have been prevented if the government would only have notified the population of an outbreak of the disease immediately after it occurred. Today, taking into account the mistakes of the past, the heads of almost all developed countries of the world have already actively joined the fight against the spread of false information about the virus itself and the losses it brings, which cannot but affect the summing up of the final results on the number of cases.
The timely response of the Chinese authorities from Wuhan was the first step in the fight against coronavirus. The introduction of self-isolation rules and the constant reminder to observe the rules of personal hygiene also played a large role in containing the dangerous infection. Meanwhile, in 1918, everything was exactly the opposite: people, not knowing about a dangerous disease hovering literally next to them, went to all kinds of rallies, concerts and mass events in honor of the end of the war, where they received their "portion" of the virus.
All this ultimately led to the fact that medical institutions ceased to cope with the increasing flow of cases. So, entire villages and individual settlements completely died out due to the banal lack of information among their population about the existence of the virus and the lack of drugs necessary for treatment.
Photos from the time of the Spanish woman.
If we talk about the similarities between the two pandemics, then the use of medical masks was and is one of the main requirements when people visit public places. It is worth noting that during the Spanish flu, people were forced to face not only the disease itself, but also its unpleasant social consequences. It is known, for example, that people without medical masks were denied access to any previously available public transport.
Fortunately for us, modern mankind has long known not only medical masks and thorough hand washing, but also all kinds of antiseptics and, most importantly, knowledge of the very existence of the coronavirus. All of the above may be enough at least to try to prevent complications in a person, at the same time preventing the further spread of the infection. But this already inspires hope.
Daria Eletskaya