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A Comparative Analysis of the Spanish Flu 1918 and COVID-19 Pandemics



Akhilesh Agrawal1, *, Aadesh Gindodiya2, Kaivalya Deo3, Supriya Kashikar4, Punit Fulzele1, Nazli Khatib1
1 Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences, Wardha, Maharashtra 442004, India
2 Council of Information and Broadcasting (Government of India), New Delhi, India
3 Department of Biomedical Engineering, TEXAS A&M University, College Station, TX , USA
4 Department of Molecular Biology, Genext Genomics Pvt Ltd, Nagpur, India


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© 2021 Agrawal et al.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Jawaharlal Nehru Medical College, Datta Meghe Institute of Medical Sciences, Wardha, Maharashtra 442004, India; E-mail:agrawalakhilesh77@gmail.com


Abstract

Two devastating pandemics, the Spanish Flu and COVID-19, emerged globally in 1918 from America and 2019 from China, respectively. Influenza virus A H1N1, which caused Spanish Flu and SARS-CoV2, which caused COVID-19, belong to different virus family and bear different structure, genomic organization and pathogenicity. However, the trajectory of the current outbreak of COVID-19 depicts a similar picture of the Spanish Flu outbreak. Estimates suggest that ~500 million infected cases and ~50 million deaths occurred globally from 1918-1919 due to the H1N1 virus. While SARS-CoV2 accounted for ~2 million cases and 130,885 deaths just within three and a half months, and the number is still increasing. To contain the spread of COVID-19 and to prevent the situation which happened a century back, it becomes essential to examine and correlate these pandemics in terms of their origin, epidemiology and clinical scenario. The strategies tailored to control the Spanish Flu pandemic may help to contain the current pandemic within time.

Keywords: Spanish flu, Influenza virus, H1N1, COVID-19, Coronavirus, SARS-CoV.