Kovid-19 has killed millions of people across the world.
It has been more than two years since the world battled the coronavirus pandemic. Since 2019, there have been successive waves of infections that have had a devastating impact on the population. Some of these waves proved to be more lethal in some countries, where COVID-19 infections caused large numbers of deaths and strained healthcare infrastructure.
Since then COVID-19 Scientists around the world are looking for examples to help predict the future of infectious disease. As part of this global effort, they are investigating a respiratory disease that originated in Russia 130 years ago.
According to a report in the New York Times, scientists have claimed that the mysterious disease called “Russian Flu” could be caused by a virus like SARS-COV-2.
The disease of May 1889 spread around the world, overwhelming hospitals and killing old people 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 other parallels with a more than a century-old wave of infections, scientists further told the NYT that some patients who had recovered reported a lingering exhaustion and that the flu finally ended after three waves of infections. Gone.
This behavior has led to speculation in the scientific community that the ‘Russian flu’ was actually caused by the coronavirus.
“I would say, maybe,” 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 solid data to support the hypothesis. “There is little, almost no hard data on the Russia flu pandemic,” Yale’s Frank Snowden told the NYT.
Belgian Professor Marc Van Ranst, an expert on the coronavirus, echoed similar sentiments, but said SARS-COV-2 could become a continuously circulating, or “endemic”, virus. Speaking to the European Union’s research and innovation journal Horizon, he pointed to the development of OC43, a coronavirus that jumped from cows to humans in 1890 and can cause severe colds.
Professor Ranst said epidemics like the ‘Russian flu’ were happening all the time “but we didn’t pay attention to them”. He said that it took time for the infection to spread due to less resources at that time. But now, the studies have gathered momentum and scientists are trying to learn from past experiences, he said.
There have also been other pandemics in the last 100 years, which scientists are looking for clues to the end of COVID-19. One of those epidemics dates back to 1918, which subsided after three waves of infection, but the virus, H1N1, remained in circulation as a lesser virus until 1957, when it disappeared.
Then H2N2 emerged. It was quite different from H1N1 and caused a pandemic. This pattern repeated with the emergence of H3N2 in 1968.
But H1N1 returned in 1977. Along with another virus, H3N2, they have been circulating ever since.
It’s a mystery scientists are trying to solve, flu researcher Dr. David Moranes told the NYT.
The current wave of COVID-19 is led by the Omicron version of the coronavirus, which has been dubbed a “worry type” by the World Health Organization (WHO). Many of its sub-variants are also under observation as people go through the difficult phase of the third year of the pandemic.
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