REVIEW ARTICLE
A Comparative Analysis of the Spanish Flu 1918 and COVID-19 Pandemics
Akhilesh Agrawal1, *, Aadesh Gindodiya2, Kaivalya Deo3, Supriya Kashikar4, Punit Fulzele1, Nazli Khatib1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2021Volume: 14
Issue: Suppl-1, M3
First Page: 128
Last Page: 134
Publisher ID: TOPHJ-14-128
DOI: 10.2174/1874944502114010128
Article History:
Received Date: 9/5/2020Revision Received Date: 16/9/2020
Acceptance Date: 8/10/2020
Electronic publication date: 22/03/2021
Collection year: 2021
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.
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.