Covid-19 has now killed about as many Americans as the Spanish flu of 1918-19 – about 675,000. And like the global scourge a century ago, the coronavirus may never completely disappear from our midst.
Instead, scientists hope that the virus that causes Covid-19 will turn into a mild seasonal bug as human immunity is boosted through vaccinations and repeated infections. That would take a while.
“We hope it will turn out like a cold, but there are no guarantees,” said Emory University biologist Rustom Antia, who suggests an optimistic scenario in which this could happen in a few years.
For now, the pandemic still has a firm grip on the United States and other parts of the world.
The delta-driven surge in new infections may have peaked, but the US death toll still averages over 1,900 a day, its highest since early March, and the country’s total stood at nearly 674,000 as of Monday morning Data collected by Johns Hopkins University, although the real number is believed to be higher.
Winter could bring another spike, although according to one influential model, it will be less fatal than last year. The University of Washington model predicts that about 100,000 more Americans will die from Covid-19 by January 1, bringing the total US toll count to 776,000.
The 1918-19 influenza pandemic killed an estimated 675,000 Americans in a US population one-third that of today’s population. It hit 50 million victims worldwide at a time when the world had a quarter as many people as it does today. The number of worldwide deaths from Covid-19 is now more than 4.6 million.
The Spanish flu death toll is rough estimates due to incomplete records of the era and poor scientific understanding of the cause of the disease. The 675,000 figure is from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The waning of Covid-19 could occur if the virus becomes progressively weaker in the course of its mutation and the immune systems of more and more people learn to attack it. Vaccination and survival from infection are the most important means of improving the immune system. Breast-fed infants also receive some immunity from their mothers.
In this optimistic scenario, school children would get a mild illness that trains their immune systems. As they grow up, the children would carry the memory of the immune response so that when they are old and vulnerable, the coronavirus would be no more dangerous than cold viruses.
The same goes for vaccinated teenagers today: their immune systems would be boosted from the injections and minor infections.
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“We will all get infected,” Antia predicted. “The important thing is whether the infections are serious.”
Something similar happened with the H1N1 flu virus, the culprit of the 1918-19 pandemic. It met too many people who were immune and eventually became weakened by mutation. H1N1 is still circulating today, but human immunity acquired through infection and vaccination has prevailed.
An annual flu shot now protects against H1N1 and several other strains of flu. While between 12,000 and 61,000 Americans die from the flu every year, it is a seasonal and manageable problem on average.
Before Covid-19, the 1918-19 flu was widely considered to be the worst pandemic disease in human history. It is unclear whether the current scourge will ultimately prove more deadly.
In many ways, the 1918-19 flu – mistakenly called Spanish flu because it was first widespread in Spain – was worse.
Spread by the mobility of World War I, it killed young, healthy adults in large numbers. There was no vaccine to slow it down, and there were no antibiotics to treat secondary bacterial infections. And of course the world population was much smaller than it is today.
Jet travel and mass migrations, however, threaten to take the toll on the current pandemic. Much of the world is not vaccinated. And the coronavirus is full of surprises.
The medical historian Dr. Howard Markel of the University of Michigan said he was consistently amazed at the level of disruption the pandemic has brought to the planet.
“I was overwhelmed by the size of the quarantines,” said Markel, “and since then I’ve been overwhelmed to the nth degree.” The slow pace of US vaccinations is the latest source of his astonishment.
“Big pockets of American society – and, worse, its leaders – threw that away,” said Markel of the possibility of vaccinating everyone in the meantime.
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Just under 64 percent of the US population have received at least one dose of the vaccine, with rates ranging from a high of about 77 percent in Vermont and Massachusetts to a low of about 46 percent to 49 percent in Idaho, Wyoming. West Virginia and Mississippi.
According to Our World in Data, around 43 percent of the world’s population have received at least one dose, with some African countries just starting to give their first injections.
“We know that all pandemics are over,” said Dr. Jeremy Brown, director of emergency care research at the National Institutes of Health, who wrote a book on influenza. “They can do terrible things while they’re raging.”
Covid-19 could have been far less fatal in the US if more people had been vaccinated faster, “and we still have the option to reverse it,” Brown said. “We often lose sight of how lucky we are to take these things.” Of course. “
The current vaccines work very well at preventing serious illness and death from the variants of the virus that have emerged so far.
It will be critical for scientists to make sure the constantly mutating virus hasn’t changed enough to bypass vaccines or cause serious illness in unvaccinated children, Antia said. Such shifts would require defensive strategies to be adjusted and would mean a longer path to a post-pandemic world.
If the virus changes significantly, a new vaccine using the technology behind the Pfizer and Moderna shots could be made in 110 days, a Pfizer manager said Wednesday. The company is investigating whether annual vaccinations with the current vaccine are required to keep immunity high.
One plus: the coronavirus mutates more slowly than flu viruses, making it a more stable target for vaccination, said Ann Marie Kimball, retired professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington.
Will the current pandemic replace the 1918-19 flu pandemic as the worst in human history?
“You would like to say no. We have a lot more infection control, a lot more ways to support sick people. We have modern medicine, ”said Kimball. “But we have a lot more people and a lot more mobility … The fear is that at some point a new strain will bypass a certain vaccine target.”
Among the unvaccinated people who count on infection rather than vaccination for immune protection, Kimball said, “The problem is, to get immunity, you have to survive the infection.” It’s easier, she said, to the drugstore to go and get an injection.
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