What the epidemic of Spanish flu in 1918 to teach us during the era of coronavirus?

As the number one news, coronavirus continues his journey around the world, creating around serious excitement and anxiety of people. Although exactly what this global pandemic, to predict it is currently impossible, according to the experience of previous years we can safely assume about a possible final COVID-19. Oddly enough, but digging into the history of the proliferation of the world-famous “Spanish flu”, it is possible to understand that the most massive flu pandemic in history has some common features with the modern coronavirus infection. Like, at first glance, two completely different virus that broke out in different periods of development of medicine can have something in common? Let's try to understand all this in this article.

The “Spanish flu” - like coronavirus?

Modern can have many scenarios, both positive and negative. If you use past experience, we can understand that the occurrence of certain negative events, you can try to prevent taking into account only the experience of generations past. For this you can try to go back to 1918, when the world was engulfed a deadly flu virus, known in history under the name “Spanish flu”. In order to assess the scale of the pandemic, it is enough to know that for the first 25 weeks after the infection killed about 25 million people.

The difficult postwar years, lack of sanitation and poor nutrition have helped the virus to spread in many countries and acquire global scale, but the flu virus is familiar to many of us as the H1N1 virus was a real super virus that time. It is worth noting that now it is quite dangerous, becoming responsible for the outbreak of “swine” flu in 2009.

During a raging Spanish flu killed not only the elderly and people with weakened immune systems, but also young and completely healthy. Almost a lightning fatality was due to the fact that infected lungs were filled with liquid, resulting in people literally drowning without water. Fortunately for all of us, modern coronavirus does not cause such terrible consequences.

Until now, few people know that the Spanish flu first appeared not in Spain and America in 1917. As COVID-19, virus to the Spanish flu mutated and became partly spread, together with the forces during the First world war, says the portal . In just a year of its existence, the virus was able to kill more people than did the war itself.

the Main error in the spread of Spanish flu was the continued concealment of the facts of hostilities

In war between the countries of Europe spread fast enough, but because of military censorship of the time could not prevent the leakage of information about the outbreak within the countries of the epidemic, authorities have long kept silent the reality of the situation. So, the death of a huge number of people could have been prevented if only the government would have informed the population about the outbreak of the disease immediately after its occurrence. Today, taking into account the mistakes of the past, the heads of almost all the developed countries already actively involved in the fight against the spread of false information about the virus and bring their losses, which can not affect the tabulation of results on the number of cases.

Timely reaction of the Chinese authorities of Wuhan city is the first step in . The implementing rules of isolation and the constant reminder of the personal hygiene also played a large role in containing infection. Meanwhile, in 1918 it was exactly the opposite: people not knowing about the dangerous disease, hovering literally next to them, looked out on all sorts of rallies, concerts and public events in honor of the end of the war, where he received his “portion” of the virus.

All this led ultimately to the fact that medical institutions no longer cope with the increasing flow of patients. So, entire villages and isolated settlements have gone completely extinct due to simple lack of public information about the existence of the virus and the lack of adequate treatment for drugs.

Photo from the time of the Spanish flu.

If we talk about the similarities between the two pandemics, the use of medical masks it is one of the main . It should be noted 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 humanity has long known not only medical mask and thorough hand-washing, and all sorts of antiseptic and most importantly — knowledge about the existence of coronavirus. All of the above may be sufficient at least to try to prevent the person complications, at the same time preventing the further spread of infection. But this is encouraging.

Spanish flu took about 50-100 million human lives.