The COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to become more deadly than the 1918 flu pandemic, a new study suggests.
Remembered as the deadliest pandemic in recent history, the 1918 flu pandemic infected one third of the world’s population and killed at least 50 million people, 675,000 of them in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). At the time, there were no vaccines and no antibiotics to treat secondary infections that had inevitably gone up in flu patients. However, the company used measures such as the current ones used to limit the spread, such as imposing quarantines and supporting good personal hygiene, according to the CDC.
Over a century later, the world found itself in the grip of another pandemic, this one caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 – and it’s still not clear exactly how deadly it is. The virus has now infected at least 22.2 million people and claimed at least 783,525 lives worldwide, according to the Johns Hopkins dashboard.
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To compare the current pandemic with previous centuries, a group of researchers focused on a sliver of the world that was hit hard by both viruses. In the spring, SARS-CoV-2 hit New York City, causing more than 19,000 known deaths – and more than 4,600 likely deaths than those likely caused by COVID-19, but there are no positive laboratory tests to confirmation, according to the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
Using data from the CDC, the New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the U.S. Census Bureau, the researchers compared mortality in New York City during the early COVID-19 outbreak with the mortality rate at the 1918 H1N1 impact pandemic.
The researchers specifically analyzed deaths from all causes in New York City in October and November of 1918 – the height of the flu pandemic in the city – and compared them to the same death since all cases since 1914. deaths before March 11 to May 11 of this year in New York City, when the COVID-19 outbreak peaked and ended in New York. The time periods they compared were each 61 days long.
The researchers chose to compare the early outbreak in NYC with the peak of the flu of 1918, instead of with the milder wave of impact that struck in the spring of 1918, so that “people can get context for how serious” this modern outbreak, said lead author Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and an instructor at Harvard Medical School.
They found that during the peak of the impact in 1918 in New York City, a total of 31,589 deaths from the entire cause (this included deaths from any cause) occurred among the 5.5 million residents who lived there at the time. Mortality with all causes in the peak of the influenza pandemic in 1918 was 2.8 times higher than in the same months in previous years.
In contrast, before the early 2020 outbreak of COVID-19 in New York City, they found that 33,465 deaths from all causes occurred among 8.28 million residents between March 11 and May 11. The mortality rate of all causes in those months of 2020 was 4.15 times higher than those months between 2017 and 2019.
That means that during the peak of the 1918 flu pandemic in NYC, about 287 per 100,000 people died a month from any cause in NYC, while during the early COVID-19 outbreak, about 202 per 100,000 people died a month in the city . That the mortality of all causes in the spring of 2020 was 70% of the mortality of the whole cause in the autumn of 1918. “If we do that, we see that COVID-19 really has the potential and already unfortunately per capita death caused rates that were in the same ballpark, “Faust told Live Science.
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But there is another way to look at the deaths related to each pandemic: comparing deaths during a pandemic with the baseline you would expect at a given time. There were more “excessive deaths” during the 1918 flu than the early outbreak of COVID-19. But relatively speaking, the COVID-19 outbreak actually looks lower in the spring, as numbers double from pre-pandemic times (from a baseline of about 50 deaths per 100,000 people per month), while in the peak of ‘ the flu of 1918, the numbers less than tripled (from a baseline of about 100 deaths per 100,000 people per month).
“It’s a bigger shock to our system, but that’s a little unfair because we started with a lower mortality rate,” than there was in 1918, because of advances in hygiene, medicine, public health and safety, “Faust said. Really, we do not yet know if the 1918 pandemic will be more deadly than the COVID-19 pandemic, he added. Maybe what happened in New York in the spring was a “freak thing,” before interventions like masks and shutdowns took hold; or perhaps the numbers will gradually creep up to match the deaths seen in the 1918 flu until an effective vaccine is found.
One limitation of the study is that it is not possible to directly compare how infected and harmful the two viruses are to humans and it is unknown how many deaths were caused by SARS-CoV-2 due to modern interventions that did not occur a century ago were available, the authors wrote.
“All we know is that in this little loop of time we were looking at, there are certainly enough similarities that it just can’t be fixed,” Faust said. “We have asked the question how did this compare to the worst pandemic in modern history, and we have given the first possible window on it and I think further research will give us more answers as to whether it is not so bad, similar or worse. ”
In the meantime, the message is to take home those places with hard hit, social distance, quarantine and wearing masks are critical. “Unlike any other pandemic we’ve ever faced, flattening the curve can actually do more than just the death rate … it can actually buy us time to get a vaccine,” Faust said. “If you do not do these things, mayhem of historical proportions is actually possible. It is not guaranteed, but it is possible.”
The findings were published in the journal on August 13 JAMA Network open.
Originally published on Live Science.
