NYT: The Pandemic’s Future — and Ours

Christakis describes an intriguing precedent, though, with some circumstantial evidence to support it. The virus called OC43 is a human coronavirus that causes nothing more severe than the common cold. In fact, along with one other coronavirus, it accounts for as much as 30 percent of all colds. Christakis cites research suggesting that OC43 spilled into people, from cattle, around 1890, which happened to coincide with the beginning of a severe pandemic that was known as the “Russian flu,” because its first major outbreak occurred in St. Petersburg, in December 1889. This “flu” swept out of Russia, across Europe, to the United States and much of the rest of the world, as fast as trains and ships could carry it, killing about a million people. Was it truly influenza? No one knows, because the concept “virus” hadn’t yet been defined, because viruses couldn’t be seen through a light microscope and because no modern scientific team has yet found a frozen victim of that 1890 pandemic, awakened a virus and identified it by genome sequencing.

There are hints. The lethality of the 1890 bug was low among children and especially high among people over 70. In addition to causing respiratory illness, it sometimes attacked the gastrointestinal tract or produced blazing headaches and body aches, symptoms that Christakis calls less typical of influenza. He suggests that the 1890 event was a pandemic of OC43, a coronavirus passed to humans from some Russian cow. “After being among us for a century, this virus would have further evolved to Be a mild pathogen that just causes the common cold today.”

Länk NYT