Is Our Pandemic the Ghost of the 1889 Russian Flu?

February 15, 2022 8:54 AM

The ‘dreaded disease’ that claimed 1.5 million looks a lot like COVID-19, including the long-term threat posed by ‘viral promiscuity.’ Andrew Nikiforuk TheTyee.ca
posted by bq (18 comments total)

Wow. That was fascinating but also kind of scary in its implications. Thank you for posting.
posted by DiscourseMarker at 9:36 AM on February 15, 2022 [2 favorites]

Good gawd.

“It should make us worry,” David Enard, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, told the New York Times. “What is going on right now might be going on for generations and generations.”

posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:39 AM on February 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

"At the time, physicians initially discounted the outbreak as nothing more than a “jolly rant” or another cold. Most predicted a mild and short visitation. They were wrong on both points.

The “dreaded Russian disease” persisted in waves over a five-year period, eventually killing more than 1.5 million people on a planet then inhabited by only 1.5 billion humans. It reappeared in 1900."

So you're saying JUST positive speech acts alone can't effect something that was here before speech was?? You can't just say something is fine and that makes it fine?? You mean that's never worked before and again won't work this time?? Even though we're smarter and better than any human being who has ever lived?? Huge if true.


"He added this sobering thought: “If the data from the end of the 19th century are an indication, COVID-19 may occupy us for a decade in multiple infection waves without much clinical attenuation if not stopped by vaccination programs that achieve herd immunity or breakthroughs in drug development which make COVID-19 a treatable disease with low mortality.”"

It seems from the article that when we treat people & animals inhumanely then disease breaks out and no one seems interested in treating people and animals humanely so yeah.
posted by bleep at 10:13 AM on February 15, 2022 [14 favorites]

The Honigsbaum article in the Telegraph linked in the FPP article is well worth reading too.

If the Russian flu was due to a coronavirus – and it is an “if” – the Victorian experience does not augur well for our present. Epidemiologists estimate that up to 60 per cent of the population was infected in the initial phase between 1889 and 1892. But herd immunity does not appear to have been reached, hence the recurrent waves of illness, marked by high mortality.

“You don’t get herd immunity with coronaviruses,” says Paul Hunter, an epidemiologist at the University of East Anglia.

Our situation is somewhat different now with vaccines, but I'm not sure the fundamental situation has changed with the current levels of vaccine uptake and the immune evasiveness of Omicron.
posted by ssg at 10:30 AM on February 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

Here's the Harald Brüssow article that makes the case for a recurrence of "Russian flu" around 1900, i.e. giving a 10-year rather than 5-year timeframe for a coronavirus pandemic. It's interesting, but pretty speculative.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 10:40 AM on February 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

I don't think any of my history classes covered any previous pandemics. I wonder if it's because they were treated as natural disasters without any cause or ways to mitigate. I wonder if this is going to be the first one where that's not the case, since countries had tools to mitigate and treat it, and their wildly differing outcomes.
posted by meowzilla at 11:25 AM on February 15, 2022 [3 favorites]

From the Telegraph article:

The Lancet medical journal even went as far as to blame “dread of the epidemic” on the worldwide telegraphic network which, in 1889, had enabled Reuters correspondents to transmit news of the pandemic from St Petersburg well ahead of domestic outbreaks.

Even back then, they understood that the telegraph was just spreading information about the pandemic. Send one of today’s loonies back in time and they would probably try to convince people that doctors were prescribing pills full of tiny telegraph keys.
posted by snofoam at 12:18 PM on February 15, 2022 [9 favorites]

Excellent read! And confirms something I've wondered about for a while:

Convinced that coronaviruses have probably played a critical role in previous epidemics, a team of researchers form Arizona and Australia parsed the human genome for evidence.

About 20,000 years ago, a coronavirus epidemic left an imprint on the DNA of people living today. The outbreak interacted with human genes in East Asia and left behind a calling card: antiviral modifications in at least 10 different human genes.

The gene fortification only occurred in an East Asian population and probably required a lot of deaths for the human genome to respond with these modifications.

The researchers concluded that ancient RNA virus epidemics have probably occurred frequently in human evolution.

I mused that perhaps previous 'pre-historic' encounters could have left impressions on the human genome which may explain why some people are more susceptible to and/or apt to develop more extreme symptoms from C19 than others.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 12:36 PM on February 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

This idea was touched on by Dame Anne Johnson in her 2022 Darwinday Lecture [about 3 minutes of speculation in a much longer lecture] sponsored by the Humanists UK 4 days ago. tl;dw: maybe / not - insufficient evidence to resolve.
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:40 PM on February 15, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thanks for the link, BobTheScientist. Absolutely very early days on this sort of genome sleuthing and I look forward to further research in this area. Something is going to explain the huge variability in response to C19 and I don't believe that's going to be found in the virus itself.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 3:16 PM on February 15, 2022

The Arctic is melting, along with everything that died and froze there, or was buried in the tundra. For a while in this epidemic I watched world maps of the emergence, and there was a latitudinal line of infection across Russia, and I thought is it The Orient Express route, or is it the melt? In the US, Highway 40 was an easily observed transmission route. Whole populations of us have vanished here and there. Craig Venter's group said that at some point in the last 50,000 years our species number was down to 1,200 or so. Might have been illness, rather than cataclysm, carried by bird migration to animal migration, to rivers and so forth.
posted by Oyéah at 3:27 PM on February 15, 2022 [4 favorites]

Walp, I came out of isolation today for the first time in two months. Walked in the drug store with my N95 on... And there was a guy there without a mask, just chatting away with the poor sales clerk.
Guess I'll go back home and not come out for a while.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 7:08 PM on February 15, 2022 [6 favorites]

I went to the Dentist in a giant medical office building in LA today. A repairman walked in to the first floor lobby without a mask. He said that he didn't have one. The security guard had one for him.
posted by bootlegpop at 1:44 AM on February 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

What's really bothering me is that people are still individuating their covid-19 risk by considering a single individual infection. That is absolutely not the world we will be leaving in if the "learn to live with covid-19" lobby continues to hold sway. The real risk is the cumulative risk from all the infections you incur over the duration of the pandemic. So if it follows trends and we let it rip you'll be looking at at least 2 infections per year and two years in we show no ability or will to actually control this so say it lasts 5-10 years. Even assuming low end estimates of 5% risk long-covid per infection (the current estimates are something like 33-66%) we will end up with somewhere between 1/2 and all of the population getting a new long-term disability from the pandemic (in addition to whatever disabilities they may already have). If the Case Fatality Rate (CFR) stays the same at about 1/2 of a percent of all cases your baseline risk will be between a 5% and 10% chance of death over the pandemic. This assumes the virus mutates enough to escape infection acquired immunity (and it appears quite capable of this) and that it doesn't get more infectious (the actual case is that it does) and that it also doesn't get more deadly or cause more disability ( Omicron only got about 33% weaker even with a huge number of people with vaccinations and prior infection). This rough calculation also ignores that in a 10 year pandemic people will age into higher risk categories and acquire comorbidies.

The cumulative risks of a long running pandemic with high spread are being wildly underestimated or ignored and it is driving me crazy.
posted by srboisvert at 5:00 PM on February 16, 2022 [17 favorites]

Thank you for that this is something that's been on my mind too & I don't think it's being said enough or maybe at all. It's absolutely terrifying. It's no wonder people feel good about deciding it couldn't possibly be really happening. It shouldn't be happening.
posted by bleep at 5:51 PM on February 16, 2022 [1 favorite]

The way things are going, we may get covid what, five or six times a year? We could have punchcards and with the fifth bout of covid, you get a sixth one with a new variant for free!
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:55 PM on February 16, 2022 [2 favorites]

The risk we are taking with long Covid is absolutely crazy. Even if vaccination reduces the risk by about 50%, which is our best guess so far, the number of people infected is so large that a lot of people are going to end up with long term illness and disability. No government will even take long Covid seriously in the discussion about what is or isn't acceptable risk.

There's a lot of bad research out there though and 33-66% risk per infection is not credible unless you define long Covid so broadly as to make it basically meaningless. Right now, in the UK, about 2% of the population is reporting long Covid for 12+ weeks and 1% for more than a year, with 0.4% of the population reporting their daily activities are limited a lot. That's out of the total population of the UK, not out of those who were infected. If most of the population gets infected with Omicron this winter, we can expect those numbers to go up a lot.

So then the question is are you more or less likely to get long Covid after your nth infection? We don't know. There are definitely people out there who have long Covid after their second round of Covid though, so it isn't impossible. And is there a genetic susceptibility that will limit the total number of people who end up with long Covid? Evidence from ME/CFS, another very similar generally post-infectious illness, suggests there is a genetic component. So that may reduce the total number that end up with long Covid somewhat, but we're still going to end up with a lot of people disabled, potentially indefinitely.

The infection fatality rate is definitely significantly lower for nth infections though, there's no doubt that past infection trains the immune system much like the vaccine does, so we're definitely not looking at 5-10% risk of death for the general population.
posted by ssg at 6:37 PM on February 16, 2022 [3 favorites]

As a note, those who are interested in tracing the pandemic through local digital news archives in the Anglosphere will likely have better luck with the search term "Russian grippe", or simply "grippe" restricted to the relevant period. (As in "a visitor reports that the grippe is very bad in Mumblesville this year, and practically the whole town is laid up.")
posted by Not A Thing at 12:00 PM on February 17, 2022 [2 favorites]