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Maintaining the proportions linked to the particularities between the two pathogens – the H1N1 influenza virus and the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2 – the historian’s conclusions show that, overall, the mortality of the Spanish flu has vanished with the widespread continuing. to live with the new threat. The author of “The Great Influenza” suggests the same could happen with the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
The mutations that the 1918 flu virus underwent during the spread process had two consequences. On the one hand, repeated changes at the micro-molecular level have prevented scientists ever since creating a vaccine against the Spanish flu, and on the other hand, these mutations have led to a significant decrease in the number of deaths.
Mortality, inversely proportional to the spread of H1N1
In other words, in 1920, with the spread of H1N1, two years after the first diseases, mortality among infected people was lower. A study cited in the paper by John M. Barry shows that the virus “interest” was to infect as many hosts as possible, not to kill them before they spread.
US physician William Henry Welch – the first dean of Johns Hopkins Medical University in the United States – notes that it is “humiliating” for researchers as H1N1 fades its virulence before the medical world fully understands how it spreads and find a cure. efficient.
What William Henry Welch failed to guess in the 1920s was that the Spanish flu virus would not go away completely.
Dr. Fauci, in 2009: “We live in the pandemic era of the Spanish flu”
The chief epidemiologist of the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci, published in 2009 an article with two researchers specializing in the spread of influenza viruses in which they showed that the viral strain responsible for the spread of the Spanish flu in 1918 created a “pandemic era. “in the last century.
At the time of publication, the H1N1 virus was in its fourth “generation” of mutations in the strain responsible for the Spanish flu pandemic. “All the pandemics that have occurred since then – in 1957 (no – H2N2, Asian flu), 1968 (no – H3N2) and 2009 (no – AH1N1 or swine flu) were generated by viruses derived from the responsible The flu virus that people get each year may be directly linked to the Spanish flu virus, “researcher Jeffery Taubenberger told the Washington Post.
That’s why experts say that many of the measures taken by health authorities a century ago are similar to those currently in place.
As now, after the 1918 pandemic began, measures were put in place to “flatten the curve” of infections: wearing masks became mandatory, many cities went into solitary confinement and some activities were suspended, says researcher Jeremy Greene. majoring in medical history from Johns Hopkins University. Obviously, the main factor in the spread of the Spanish flu virus – the mobilization of troops during the First World War – could not be avoided.
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