Do you wonder what life with covid is going to be like a year from now? What about five years, or decades from now?I will take this excuse to chat about one of my favorite tangents: late nineteenth century Russian history.
Today’s Moment of Science… the first coronavirus pandemic. Maybe.
We’ve gotten much more familiar with words like endemic, pandemic, and epidemic since covid shat itself onto this fair Earth, but here’s a quick vocab primer. An epidemic is when there’s an outbreak of an illness affecting a local community or region, generally contained within one country. A pandemic is what happens when an epidemic spreads across multiple regions of the globe, having the potential to infect a large percentage of the population. An endemic virus is one that has a sustained infection level in a population.
Currently, there is a yellow fever epidemic in Nigeria, a covid pandemic almost everywhere, and the common cold is endemic worldwide. I’m personally rooting for the dancing plague of 1518 to make a comeback as ‘endemic boogie fever.’
So, HCov-OC43. Or, OC43 for short.
There are currently four endemic coronaviruses that cause mild upper respiratory infections. It’s speculated that OC43, a betacoronavirus, may have caused a lethal pandemic about 130 years ago.
In 1889 in Russia, my great-grandmother Esther was born. Probably more importantly to you, a pandemic started. In May of that year, reports of the illness originated in Bukhara, a city in current day Uzbekistan. New railroads provided the virus a convenient passage through Russia to most of Europe and Asia in a matter of months, eventually making it to the east coast of the US by December. It traveled across the country in mere weeks, and down to South America by February.
The ‘Russian Flu,’ as it was called, came with its fair share of conspiracy theories. In the absence of any real explanation or treatment for the illness, utter bullshit was there to fill the void. It was caused by the electric light or it could be cured with quinine (it was not and it could not). Inhalers- that almost certainly did nothing- promised to remove excess ‘catarrh,’ or mucus. Foods like oysters and brandy were recommended to ward off infection- and my god why did we ever question the wisdom of these geniuses?
It’s suspected that the virus continued circulating in waves until 1895. Without vaccines, getting herd immunity’s a bitch, eh?
The total reported number of infections is hard to pin down, with reports placing it as high as 900 million (out of a global population of 1.5 billion at the time). Approximately one million lives were lost through the course of the pandemic.
Was it a coronavirus? We really don’t know. But we also don’t have any decent proof of what it was, and OC43 might just fit the profile better than an influenza virus.
The illness had symptoms that sound oddly familiar. Cough, fever, pneumonia, and cases tended to be worse for older people and those with pre-existing illnesses. Older people suffered most of the casualties, and unlike the 1918 flu pandemic phenomenon in which young people experienced deadly cytokine storm, youth was much more protective with this virus. There were also neurological symptoms reported, which is common to other coronaviruses and some cases of OC43 today.
At some point, OC43 likely jumped from cows to humans. In 2005, scientists were trying to figure out approximately when that happened. Calculating based on the mutation rate, it was hypothesized that it entered the human population right in time to fuck up some shit in Russia in 1889.
It’s perfectly possible that they’re wrong. It’s possible that they’re right, it started infecting humans around the exact time of the pandemic, but it didn’t cause the pandemic. And it’s possible that Great Grandma Esther and I both lived through coronavirus pandemics.
OC43 was only discovered in the 1960s, and samples weren’t taken from victims of the Russian flu. So lest we go digging through the graves of pandemic victims hoping for sufficiently intact brains to tickle, we have some clues but mostly speculation.
It might be wishful thinking that we already weathered a deadly coronavirus pandemic through some combination of viral mutations and the efforts of our collective immune systems. A coronavirus or influenza, it eventually faded into something that we survive relatively unscathed, which makes me feel a bit better when I think about life with covid five or ten years from now.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, not at all suggesting dart guns full of covid vaccines to speed up this process.
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