In 1918, members of the American Red Cross removed victims of influenza.
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The coronavirus is at least as deadly as the 1918 flu pandemic and the death toll could be even lower if world leaders and public health officials do not contain it enough, researchers warned in a study published Thursday in the medical journal JAMA Network Open.
“What we want people to know is that this has potential from 1918,” said lead author Dr. Jeremy Faust in an interview, adding that the outbreak in New York was at least 70% as bad as that in 1918 when doctors did not have ventilators or other advances to save lives as they do today. “This is not something to just take up like the flu.”
Investigators compared excessive deaths in New York City during the height of the 1918 pandemic to those in the early months of the Covid-19 outbreak. They used public data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and the U.S. Census Bureau to conduct their analysis.
The increase in deaths during the 1918 flu pandemic was generally higher, but comparable to that observed in the first two months of the coronavirus outbreak in New York City, the researchers found. But taking into account improvements in hygiene, modern medicine and public health, the increase during the early outbreak of coronavirus was “substantially greater” than during the height of the 1918 pandemic, the researchers wrote.
“If not treated properly, SARS-CoV-2 infection may have similar or greater mortality than 1918 H1N1 influenza virus infection,” Faust wrote in the paper. He is a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School.
The authors of the study note that their research had limitations. The researchers said it was not known how many deaths of Covid-19 had occurred since the outbreak began due to modern health care improvements that were not available a century ago, such as supplemental oxygen and ventilators.
The new study comes as the coronavirus continues to spread rapidly across the United States and worldwide. The virus has infected more than 20 million people worldwide and killed at least 749,700, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The U.S. has the worst outbreak in the world with more than 5 million infections and at least 166,000 deaths, Hopkins data show.
The U.S. recorded more than 1,500 deaths caused by Covid-19 on Wednesday, marking the deadliest day for the country since the end of May.
A separate study published July 1 in JAMA Internal Medicine in July found that the number of confirmed U.S. deaths due to coronavirus is substantially lower than the true tally.
Those researchers found that the excessive number of deaths above normal levels also exceeded the amount attributed to Covid-19, leading them to the conclusion that many of those deaths were likely caused by the coronavirus but not confirmed. Death reports and a sharp increase in U.S. deaths amid a pandemic suggest the death toll in Covid-19 has been substantiated, they said.
The World Health Organization says there is no “silver bullet” for the virus and health care workers are likely to need a range of treatments to help patients fight the disease. Currently, many hospitals in the US use antiviral medicine inhibitor virus, which has been shown to help shorten the recovery time of some hospital patients. There are also several vaccines in development with at least 26 already in human trials, according to the WHO.
Public health officials and experts on infectious diseases have often compared Covid-19 to the 1918 flu, which is estimated to have killed 50 million people worldwide from 1918 to 1919, including 675,000 Americans, according to the CDC. More than 20 million people died in World War I, by comparison.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading expert, said the coronavirus was a “pandemic of historical proportions” and history books would probably compare it to 1918. He mentioned the “extreme” range of symptoms that humans may experience. after contracting the virus, including pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome. PMIS is a rare inflammatory condition found in children with Covid-19 that is similar to Kawasaki syndrome and has caused neurological damage in some children.
“We learn things every week,” he said on July 13.
The researchers in the new study said their findings could help officials contextualize the unusual scale of the Covid-19 pandemic and “lead to more cautious policies that could help reduce transmission.”
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