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holy shit COVID never ended??? (www.youtube.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/coronavirus@lemmy.ml
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[–] 8 points 7 months ago* (5 children)

Yeah the problem is they mutate in either direction, the "evolve to be non-lethal" part is essentially just natural selection doing its thing after the fact. But from time to time endemic viruses may just become way more lethal, as can be seen with the Spanish Flu in 1918-1920 and the Manchurian Plague in 1910-1911 (the latter having a death rate of close to 100% and being the reason face masks are widely used today). And while that could be controlled back then, it would be much harder today, given all the global traffic.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    But from time to time endemic viruses may just become way more lethal, as can be seen with the Spanish Flu in 1918-1920 and the Manchurian Plague in 1910-1911

    That's not correct. The influenza pandemic was not a new strain of influenza, it was a strain introduced to a naive population of soldiers taken from remote farm areas worldwide and concentrated into one small region of Europe. Then, the soldiers left the war and spread flu all across the remote areas of the US. The flu pandemics are more about naive populations. Same thing happened when Europeans first came to North America and wiped out indigenous populations with influenza.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago* (2 children)

    Then, the soldiers left the war and spread flu all across the remote areas of the US.

    Nah you are missing the point here. There was an already bad influenza strain, and millions of soldiers moving home on densely populated ships for weeks was a perfect environment for it to rapidly mutate and select for virulence and lethality. These soldiers making landfall then spread several strains of the virus, which led to vastly different mortality rates across the US. Much like we saw with Corona viruses rapidly mutating into different strains among the lockdowns.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    It as only a "bad" strain because there was a massively immunologically naive population exposed to it.

    Again, when Europeans brought over flu, it was minor to them, but killed off the natives. Similarly, native American and Inuit populations were killed at much higher rates in 1918. The Spanish Flu was not some kind of super flu, it was a typical influenza but there was a coincidental world war to spread it around from the US to Europe and back, likely from large US pig farms.

    You can read about this here, or not.

    https://www.kumc.edu/school-of-medicine/academics/departments/history-and-philosophy-of-medicine/archives/wwi/essays/medicine/influenza.html

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    It as only a “bad” strain because there was a massively immunologically naive population exposed to it.

    Yeah no it don't think it was, maybe "strain" was the wrong word here. Death rates in Europe were also much higher than usual, so there was definitely some major mutation going on. Naive populations will certainly have played a part, but I still think the virus gaining a captive host population to mutate in for several generations on each of those troop transporters, before those incubated populations were then spread all over the country, had an effect on it being more deadly in America than it was in Europe. I mean even the article you linked seems to suggest as much:

    Military transport ships were the likely vector of influenza which was well-established around the world by August of 1918. As the pandemic grew and matured its virulence apparently increased. Mortality rates on the eastern coast of America climbed in newspaper reports, the epidemic seeming to emanate from military bases there. Thus, what had been called the “three day flu” at Camp Funston in March, with a mortality rate of perhaps two-percent, evolved into a much more severe illness in India where mortality rates in some places may have reached ten-percent.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    Very true. Additioally, younger people had not been affected by any major outbreak. There were documented cases that older people, who had survived different previous outbreaks from were not hit as badly in the Spanish flu due to ore-existing natural immunity.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22148/table/a2000c209ttt00007/?report=objectonly

    If interested this is a good read. Interesting bit:

    "The New York City data also demonstrate that mortality among people aged 45 and older during the 1918–1919 pandemic influenza season was no worse than in surrounding years. For people under age 45, however, the 1918–1919 influenza season was very bad—people in this age group were far more likely to die of influenza than in previous years. Indeed, the age groups at highest absolute risk of dying during the 1918–1919 A(H1N1) pandemic were young children and young and middle-aged adults (Table 1-6).

    These findings suggest that the early 1918 pandemic herald wave was spreading as early as February 1918, 6–7 months before the beginning of the explosive 1918–1919 pandemic. Relative to preceding influenza epidemic seasons, both the herald and pandemic waves caused proportionally more mortality in younger age groups but less mortality among those over 45 years of age, possibly as the result of recycling of an H1-like antigen from half a century earlier (Olson et al., 2004). "

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK22148/#a2000c209rrr00209

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