When trying to understand covid, we’ve compared it to diseases we’re familiar with. Since vaccines have been so effective at getting rid of history’s more colorful infectious beasts, my generation is mostly able to compare it to the common cold and influenza.
‘It’s not like it’s as bad as polio,’ I’ve often heard.
No. Covid is, in an alarming number of ways, far worse than polio.
Today’s Moment of Science… grey marrow inflammation, aka poliomyelitis.
There are records of symptoms that may have come from poliovirus as early as ancient Egypt, but epidemics only started in the late nineteenth century in Europe and America. No hypotheses on why the epidemics started happening have been substantiated, but it’s been tossed around that improved hygiene prevented this previously ‘harmless’ early life infection in more and more children. Becoming immune by weathering an asymptomatic case was more likely at a young age. These nastier outbreaks may have been a result of sanitation bubbles forming and inevitably bursting.
Which is interesting because anti-vaxxers will tell you hygiene is why we wiped out diseases. Yes, hygiene is totes why smallpox is gone from every filthy corner of this Earth, I’m sure.
Poliomyelitis, aka polio, presents with a cluster of symptoms commonly associated with the flu. Sometimes called the ‘summer grippe,’ symptomatic patients can experience a fever, upper respiratory symptoms, sore throat, and gastric distress. Polio cases with these symptoms are considered mild, classified as abortive polio, and represent most of the symptomatic infections. Highly contagious, it spreads via the orofecal route (for the love of werewolf erotica, wash your damn hands), and an infected person can spread it for weeks asymptomatically.
Estimates vary but 75-95% of cases of polio are asymptomatic. The majority of people who’ve had polio never knew. Most people who present symptoms are fine in a week or two, likely thinking they had a cold, not even taking a second to reconsider their hand washing technique.
That’s not what you think of when you think of polio though, right? You’re wondering when the science lady is gonna talk about iron lungs.
In a small portion of symptomatic cases, the virus enters the central nervous system causing inflammation in the lining of the brain, but not paralysis. It would feel like a severe flu with pain in the extremities, headaches, and neck pain. In about one percent of cases, some sneaky viruses make their way past security and into the spinal cord, attacking motor neurons. That one percent of cases are classified as paralytic polio, and those cases run the gamut of outcomes from leg braces to iron lungs.
If poliovirus makes it into the spinal cord, the chance of fatality increases significantly. But the relative rarity of that happening means that only about 0.05% of all polio cases are fatal.
So how does any of that compare to covid?
A study in October of last year from Imperial College in London found covid to have a 1.15% infection fatality ratio. An alarming number of people who are bad at statistics have taken an attitude of “pffft, I’ll take my chances with covid because 40% of cases are asymptomatic.” Huh.
Would the same people take their chances with polio?
Covid is about twenty times more likely to kill you than polio. It’s an order of magnitude more likely to give you a long term disability. It’s far more likely to land you in the hospital, and there is just a grab bag of medical fuckery it can smite you with. The worst epidemic of polio in the US saw fewer fatalities in a year than the worst weekend of the covid pandemic in the US. So far.
Polio wasn’t worse than covid. I mean please don’t lick a petri dish of this bullshit, but it just wasn’t worse than SARS’ super persistent asshole cousin.
It mostly attacked the young though, and what do douchebags say when trying to minimize how bad covid is? “It’s just hurting the sick and the elderly.” With mental images of precious children encased in iron giants, the monstrosity of polio was apparent, profound, and damn near impossible to deny.
The only people who have ever argued with me that polio wasn’t so bad were contemporary anti-vaxxers. But people who saw the horrors of paralytic polio weren’t fighting against the vaccine when it came out, were they?
…were they?
This has been part one of the polio story for today’s Moment of Science, reminding you pandemics are gonna come and go, but disinformation is forever.
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My grandmother contracted polio in the 1950s epidemic here in Australia. She spent a year (maybe longer) in a special polio ward. I’m not sure whether she was in an iron lung, but she ended up with a paralysed leg. My mother and uncle, both youngsters, had their lives turned upside down and it affected our family profoundly through three generations. I often wonder what our lives would have been like if that random person in 70 years ago had washed their hands properly and spared my Gran the polio virus.