The coronavirus pandemic, which has currently infected over 21 million and led to excess of 763,000 deaths worldwide, is often compared to the 1918 H1N1 influenza pandemic. But is it truly comparable?
That is the question researchers led by Dr. Jeremy Samuel Faust of Harvard Medical School of Emergency Medicine set out to answer in their recent study published this week in the medical journal JAMA Network Open. In the study, the group of researchers concluded that the coronavirus pandemic is at least as deadly as that 1918 pandemic, and could exceed its fatality rate if global leaders and health officials fail to contain it.
The study analyzed the excess deaths in New York City during the peak of the 1918 H1N1 influenza pandemic and compared them against the initial period of SARS-CoV-2 outbreak within the same city. Their method consisted of drawing the public death rates prior to each pandemic--1914 to 1917, and 2017 to 2019, respectively--to create a baseline and comparing it to the peak of each infections' outbreak in the city. Researchers used publicly available 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 while conducting the comparison study.
While the researchers noted that direct comparison of the two pandemics is not possible due to societal advancements in personal hygiene and modern medicine, the "relative increase during early COVID-19 period was substantially greater than during the peak of the 1918 H1N1 influenza pandemic." This statistic led researchers to conclude that, if insufficiently treated and public intervention measures are not taken, the coronavirus pandemic can lead to have deaths rates either comparable or greater than those reached in 1918.
The 1918 influenza pandemic, often nicknamed "The Spanish Flu," spread worldwide from an unknown origin from 1918-1919. It is estimated that about 500 million people, which at the time as about one-third of the world's population, was infection with the virus, resulting at at least 50 million estimated deaths. In the United States, deaths were estimated to be about 675,000. One unique feature of this pandemic that separates it from the coronavirus pandemic is that the 1918 virus had a high mortality rate in healthy people between the ages of 20-40, a fact that is still not fully understood by historians and scientists.
The Current State of U.S. Infection
Dr. Anthony Fauci, top U.S. infectious disease expert, stated this week that he is not pleased with the current state of the coronavirus outbreak within the United States. Fauci told a National Geographic panel moderated by ABC News Correspondent Deborah Roberts that the positivity rate of infections in some parts of the country as alarming and a cause for concern.
"We certainly are not where I hope we would be, we are in the middle of a very serious historic pandemic," Fauci added.
Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the C.D.C., echoed similar concerns this week, telling WebMD in an interview that years of underinvestment in public health infrastructure has left the U.S. unprepared for the coronavirus outbreak. Redfield stated that the disease will certainly be one of the leading causes of death in the nation by the end of the year, with fatality rates expected to increase as the U.S. enters another dangerous flu season this fall.
Redfield reiterated that the high rate of infections could significantly decrease if most of the nation wore masks in public, maintains social distancing and good hygiene practices, and avoided large gatherings of people.
The United States currently has over 5.4 million confirmed infections and approximately 171,000 deaths tied to the coronavirus pandemic.
