Daily Archives: April 25, 2022

BROOKVILLE, N.Y., April 25, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Results of a newly released Long Island University Steven S. Hornstein Center for Policy, Polling and Analysis national poll revealed what Americans think about wearing masks on planes and public transportation in light of a federal court order, that stated as of April 18, 2022, the CDC's Order requiring masks on public transportation conveyances and at transportation hubs was no longer in effect.

MIXED SUPPORT (42%) ON THE REMOVAL OF MASK MANDATES ONBOARD AIRLINE FLIGHTS

Americans were asked if they supported the removal of mask mandates onboard airline flights to reduce the likelihood of contracting the coronavirus; 42% of respondents said yes. Respondents with the highest support of the mask mandate removal were Republicans (73%), followed by Independents (41%) and Democrats (21%). Support of the mask mandate removal was higher in the Midwest (48%) and South (47%) than other regions in the Northeast (33%) and Pacific (35%). Respondents age 60 and older supported the mask mandate removal at a lower rate (34%) than other age brackets. Males supported the mask mandate removal at a higher rate (46%) than females (39%).

6 OUT OF 10 AMERICANS WOULD STILL WEAR A MASK WHILE TRAVELING

National poll results found that 64% of respondents said they would still wear a mask today if traveling by plane; 63% of respondents said they would still wear a mask today if traveling on public transportation. Political beliefs played a factor in respondents' choices: 87% of Democrats said they would still wear masks on planes; 84% of Democrats said they would still wear masks on public transportation; 61% of Independents said they would still wear masks on planes; 59% of Independents said they would still wear masks on public transportation; 38% of Republicans said they would still wear masks on planes; 41% of Republicans said they would still wear masks on public transportation.

71% OF AMERICANS BELIEVE WEARING MASKS REDUCES THE LIKELIHOOD OF CONTRACTING THE CORONAVIRUS

Respondents were asked if they believe wearing face masks reduces the likelihood of contracting the coronavirus: 71% of Americans said yes; 92% of Democrats said yes; 68% of Independents/Other said yes; 46% of Republicans said yes.

HALF OF AMERICANS (53%) SAID THE WORST OF THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC IS OVER

Respondents were asked if they believe the worst of the pandemic is over. Overall, 53% of respondents said yes, the highest since June 2021 through national polls conducted by the Long Island University Steven S. Hornstein Center for Policy, Polling and Analysis. Respondents with the highest confidence level that the worst of the coronavirus pandemic is over are Republicans (70%), followed by Independents (51%) and Democrats (43%).Respondents age 18-29 believe the worst is over at the highest belief rate (58%) compared to respondents age 60 and older (47%) at the lowest belief rate. Males believe the worst is over at a higher rate (57%) than females (49%).

53% OF AMERICANS SAID THEY CURRENTLY WEAR A MASK TO AVOID CONTRACTING THE CORONAVIRUS

Respondents were asked if they were currently wearing a mask in general to reduce the likelihood of contracting the coronavirus: 53% of Americans said yes; 73% of Democrats said yes; 48% of Independents/Other said yes; 34% of Republicans said yes.

62% OF AMERICANS REMAINED CONCERNED OVER RISK OF FAMILY CONTRACTING THE CORONAVIRUS (DOWN SLIGHTLY FROM 69% IN NOVEMBER 2021)

Americans were asked how concerned they are about someone in their family becoming seriously ill from the coronavirus: 62% of respondents said they are somewhat or seriously concerned as compared to 69% in an earlier November 2021 Hornstein Center national poll.78% of Democrats, 59% of Independents/Other, and 43% of Republicans said they are somewhat or seriously concerned.

75% OF AMERICANS ARE FULLY VACCINATEDAGE 12 AND OVER (UP FROM 69% IN NOVEMBER 2021)

76% OF AMERICANS ARE FULLY VACCINATEDAGE 18 AND OVER (UP FROM 71% IN NOVEMBER 2021)

90% OF AMERICANS ARE FULLY VACCINATEDAGE 65 AND OVER (UP FROM 86% IN NOVEMBER 2021)

According toCDC data, 75% of Americans age 12 and over are fully vaccinated as of April 24, 2022 (up from 69% on November 16, 2021). 76% of Americans age 18 and over are fully vaccinated (up from 71% on November 16, 2021). 90% of Americans over age 65 are fully vaccinated (up from 86% on November 16, 2021), indicating a promising way forward for the most at-risk population.

CDC AUTHORIZED COVID-19 BOOSTER VACCINES

CDC guidance on COVID-19 Booster Vaccines stated that Americans eligible for a second booster shot include adults ages 50 years and older, people ages 12 years and older who are moderately or severely immunocompromised, and people who received 2 doses (1 primary dose and 1 booster) of Johnson & Johnson's Janssen vaccine. Currently, the three vaccines that are authorized and recommended to prevent COVID-19 by the CDC arePfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine,Moderna COVID-19 vaccineandJohnson & Johnson's Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine.

METHODOLOGYThis Long Island University Steven S. Hornstein Center for Policy, Polling, and Analysis online poll was conducted through SurveyMonkey from April 21 22, 2022 among a national sample of 1,584 adults ages 18 and up. Respondents for this survey were selected from over 2.5 million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day. Data for this week have been weighted for age and gender using the Census Bureau's American Community Survey to reflect the demographic composition of the United States. The modeled error estimate for this survey is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.

ABOUT THE LONG ISLAND UNIVERSITY STEVEN S. HORNSTEIN CENTER FOR POLICY, POLLING, AND ANALYSISThe Long Island University Steven S. Hornstein Center for Policy, Polling, and Analysis conducts independent polling, empirical research, and analysis on a wide range of public issues. Our studies inform the public and policy makers about critical issues, attitudes, and trends shaping the world. Visit liu.edu/Hornstein for more information and results from this national poll.

ABOUT LONG ISLAND UNIVERSITYLong Island University, founded in 1926, continues to redefine higher education, providing high quality academic instruction by world-class faculty. Recognized byForbesfor its emphasis on experiential learning and by the Brookings Institution for its "value added" to student outcomes, LIU has a network of over 285,000 alumni, including industry leaders and entrepreneurs around the globe. Visit liu.edu for more information.

SOURCE Long Island University

Visit link:

Where Americans Stand on Coronavirus and Mask Mandates on Planes: Long Island University Hornstein Center National Poll - PR Newswire

A checkpoint in Ningbo, China. A growing number of Chinese cities are requiring truck drivers to take daily Covid P.C.R. tests.Credit...Agence France-Presse Getty Images

BEIJING Chinas mounting Covid-19 restrictions are creating further disruptions to global supply chains for consumer electronics, car parts and other goods.

A growing number of Chinese cities are requiring truck drivers to take daily Covid P.C.R. tests before allowing them to cross municipal borders or are quarantining drivers deemed to be at risk of infection. The measures have limited how quickly drivers can move components among factories and goods from plants to ports.

Shanghai and other major Chinese cities have imposed lengthy, stringent lockdowns to try to control Covid outbreaks. Previous interruptions in the supply of goods from Chinese factories to buyers around the world mainly involved the temporary closure of shipping ports, including in Shenzhen in southeastern China in May and June last year and then near Shanghai last summer.

The problem is not ships its that theres no cargo coming because there are no trucks, said Jarrod Ward, the chief East Asia business development officer in the Shanghai office of Yusen Logistics, a large Japanese supply chain management company.

The testing of truck drivers has been held up because some cities are doing mass testing of residents. Shanghai tested essentially all 25 million people within its borders in a single day on Monday and detected another 21,000 cases on Thursday.

Now, there is an acute shortage of truck drivers in Shanghai and in nearby cities like Kunshan, a center of electronics production. Many electronics components manufacturers are shutting down in Kunshan.

The key electronics suppliers to Apple, to Tesla, theyre all based there, said Julie Gerdeman, the chief executive of Everstream, a supply chain risk management affiliate of DHL that is based in San Marcos, Calif.

Apple declined to comment, and Tesla had no immediate reply to questions.

Many factories have tried to stay open by having workers stay on site instead of going home. Employees have been sleeping on mats on the floor for as long as four weeks in some cities in northeastern China. Companies have been storing goods in nearby warehouses while waiting for normal truck traffic to resume.

But as lockdowns stretch on in cities like Shanghai, Changchun and Shenyang, factories are starting to run out of materials to assemble. Some are sending their workers home until further notice.

Making car seats, for example, requires different springs, bolts and other materials. Mr. Ward said car seat producers had run out of components. Volkswagen said it had closed a factory outside Shanghai.

While Shanghais cases increase, its main rival in electronics manufacturing, Shenzhen, has emerged from lockdown. That is freeing workers and factories there to resume full-speed production.

Retailers and manufacturers in the West tried to adapt to previous supply chain difficulties in China by switching from ships to airfreight, but airfreight rates have more than doubled from last year.

The near-total suspension of passenger flights in and out of Shanghai has roughly halved the airfreight capacity there, said Zvi Schreiber, the chief executive of Freightos, a freight booking platform. The war in Ukraine has forced many airlines to schedule longer flights around Russia and Ukraine, which means each plane can make fewer trips in a week and often can carry less weight on each flight.

The war in Ukraine is also starting to hurt the availability of Soviet-era Antonov freighters, Mr. Schreiber said. These workhorses of the airfreight industry have been kept going in recent years almost entirely by Ukrainian maintenance bases that are now closed.

For companies, any additional disruptions to the global supply chain would come at a particularly fraught moment, on top of rising prices for raw materials and shipping, along with extended delivery times and worker shortages.

Excerpt from:

Covid News: At Least 53 People Test Positive After A-List Dinner in Washington - The New York Times

Arthur Allen| Kaiser Health News

In March 2020, Dr. Joseph Vinetz left the contemplative world of his Yale University infectious-disease laboratory and plunged into the COVID ward at Yale New Haven Hospital, joining an army of health care workers who struggled to treat the deadly viral disease.

There were no drugs against COVID-19, and no way to predict which infected patients would develop pneumonia or fall into an inflammatory tailspin leading to severe illness or death. In desperation, Vinetz and countless other doctor-scientists trawled the literature for existing medicines that might help.

We were in the hospital. We had nothing, Vinetz said. I was one of tens of thousands of doctors around the world who said, We gotta figure out what to do.

On April 16, 2020, Vinetz saw an article in the journal Cell about a drug called camostat, licensed in Japan in 1985 to treat inflammation of the pancreas. Research during the first SARS epidemic, in 2004, had shown the drug had a plausible biochemical mechanism for slowing coronavirus infections, so Vinetz and his colleagues quickly organized a small clinical trial on outpatients with mild to moderate symptoms.

In those days, before COVID vaccines and COVID-specific treatments appeared on the market, Vinetzs experiment was one of thousands conducted by doctors who hoped older vaccines and drugs, usually cheap and off-patent, might provide them with options.

Mostly, the drugs were too toxic or had no clear effect. Of the more than 1,500 trials for potential COVID drugs listed on the website of the National Institutes of Health including antivirals, anti-inflammatories, and drugs used for cancer, asthma, heart disease, and dozens of other conditions few have produced helpful medicines.

In fact, only one older drug is routinely used to fight COVID. Thats the steroid dexamethasone, proven by British scientists to help keep hospitalized patients from requiring supplemental oxygen or intubation.

Drugs like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin showed hints of value initially but failed in clinical trials only to remain in circulation, at least partly because their use symbolized affinity in the culture war for some of President Donald Trumps followers.

A few old drugs still show promise, but theyve had trouble getting traction. The ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine fiascoes soured doctors on repurposed medications, and the pharmaceutical industry has shown little interest in testing them, especially when it can earn billions from even mediocre new ones, scientists tracking the field say.

American and European scientists have confirmed the theoretical basis for camostats impact on COVID. But evidence for its effects is weak; last year the drug was dropped from a big NIH trial comparing various treatments.

A more promising story emerged with fluvoxamine, licensed under the brand name Luvox in 1994 to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder. The drug is in the same class as common antidepressants such as Prozac, Lexapro, and Zoloft.

A child psychiatrist noticed fluvoxamine might be good for COVID. In March 2020, while recovering from a bout of COVID, Dr. Angela Reiersen of Washington University in St. Louis saw a 2019 study in mice that showed how fluvoxamine could activate a protein similar to one missing in patients with Wolfram syndrome, a genetic disease that causes diabetes, neurological issues, and, eventually, death.

Reiersen and her colleague Dr. Eric Lenze, a geriatric psychiatrist, began a clinical trial of the drug in people with symptoms of COVID. Of the 80 in the fluvoxamine group, none suffered a serious decline, while six of 72 patients given sugar pills got pneumonia, and four were hospitalized.

In a follow-up 1,500-patient trial in Brazil, people who took at least 80% of their fluvoxamine pills were 66% less likely to require emergency care or hospitalization than those who got sugar pills. Only one died, compared with 11 in the placebo group.

Since October, when the Brazilian study was published, fluvoxamines future has dimmed. Neither the NIH nor the Infectious Diseases Society of America recommends fluvoxamine to prevent respiratory distress. The NIH panelists noted that the better outcomes in the Brazilian trial were only statistically significant among those who remained in the trial. (Because of nausea and other side effects, only 74% of trial participants in the fluvoxamine wing took all their pills, compared with 82% in the placebo wing.)

The NIH panel also was put off by the fact that the Brazilian trial counted hospitalizations as well as people put under a doctors care for six hours or more not a standard measure. Trial organizers said that was necessary because Brazilian hospitals were so packed with COVID patients that many people got their care in makeshift outdoor shelters.

Regulators and experts are awaiting results from two other big trials, one organized by a consortium of universities and hospitals, the other by the NIH. But both studies are using doses of 100 milligrams of fluvoxamine a day, compared with 200 or 300 milligrams in the successful trials.

I have concerns that they are not using a high-enough dose, Reiersen said, given that fluvoxamine operates on a different biochemical pathway to fight COVID than the one involved in psychiatric treatment.

The concern is shared by Craig Rayner, a former drug company scientist who worked on the Brazilian trial and other big tests of repurposed drugs. You can do the largest, most well-funded study in the world, he said, but if you choose the wrong dose, its rubbish in, rubbish out.

The team overseeing NIHs trial opted for a lower dose because higher doses had already been used in the earlier trials and often caused side effects, said Sarah Dunsmore, a program director at NIHs National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

On Dec. 21, David Boulware, a University of Minnesota infectious-disease expert, petitioned the FDA to approve a change in fluvoxamines label stating it can be used to prevent respiratory distress in at-risk patients with mild to moderate COVID. He hasnt received a response yet.

Its a different story for big drug companies. Two days after Boulwares submission, FDA authorized Merck to market its drug molnupiravir, which in its clinical trial showed about as much effectiveness as fluvoxamine, and also had side effects like nausea and dizziness. Fluvoxamine also can cause insomnia and anxiety; molnupiravir is not recommended for pregnant women or anyone, male or female, having unprotected sex, because it caused genetic and fetal damage in test animals.

Still, federal guidelines recommend molnupiravir in certain settings, and the government has bought more than 3 million doses for about $2.2 billion, or $733 per dose. Fluvoxamine, a generic, goes for less than $5 a pill.

You hate to say that Big Pharma has a lot of influence, but clearly they do, Boulware said. The molnupiravir data was not that great, but were spending billions on the drug and it got fast-track emergency use authorization while fluvoxamine remains in a gray area.

With the arrival of effective vaccines and the trickle of antiviral treatments, the urgency of rehabilitating old drugs for U.S. patients has ebbed. But the need remains high in lower- and middle-income countries where vaccines and new COVID treatments remain unavailable.

Its not rare for a pharmaceutical company to synthesize or study a drug for one purpose, only to discover it works better for something else. The classic instance is sildenafil, or Viagra, which was being developed as a drug for hypertension when scientists noticed a remarkable side effect. Remdesivir, now a front-line drug against COVID, was aimed at treating Ebola.

Its less common for a drug marketed for one use to acquire an entirely different purpose, but the pandemic drove scientists to try. They tested thousands of compounds in petri dishes for their virus-killing power, but the journey from test tube to human remedy is long, said Rayner, who is also a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

If fluvoxamine were a new drug, the company sponsoring it would have spent the money needed to get the drug approved and to show the FDA it has the means to monitor the drugs safety and efficacy. Since its an old drug, it will be up to independent scientists, or perhaps a reluctant generics manufacturer, to sponsor safety monitoring should the FDA provide an emergency use authorization, Rayner said.

An EUA or approval comes with strings. You have to continue to monitor the safety, to make sure no signals pop up when you move it from thousands to millions of patients, he said. Thats very expensive.

U.S. physicians can prescribe drugs off label, but most are leery of doing so until a drug has won approval for the new use. Thats especially true now.

Definitive answers on some repurposed drugs were slow in coming because there were too many small, poorly designed studies by every man and his dog, Rayner said. He calculates up to $5.6 billion has been wasted on hydroxychloroquine clinical trials alone.

A recent World Health Organization resolution called for better coordination and information-sharing among those organizing trials so that definitive answers can be obtained quickly with big pots of data.

As for camostat, Vinetz said those who took the drug felt better than those who got a placebo. It basically prevented loss of smell and taste, which people really bitterly care about, he said. That means theres a real biological effect. That merits further exploration.

But will that happen? Vinetzs team has sought publication of their research for five months with no success. Hed like to see whether camostat can prevent long COVID, but such investigations cost millions. Camostats Japanese manufacturer apparently lost interest in it as a COVID drug after its own small, unsuccessful trial.

When theres no profit motive, its tough, Vinetz said. Meanwhile, hes resumed his research into controlling a neglected tropical disease: leptospirosis.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

See more here:

Why cheap, older drugs that might treat COVID never get out of the lab - Great Falls Tribune

Patients suffering from respiratory and neurological symptoms, including loss of taste and smell.

Long-haul sufferers who struggle to muster the energy to return to work.

A pandemic with a penchant for attacking the elderly and obese with particular force.

Sounds a lot like COVID, right?

Its not.

Rather, its the Russian Flu, the worlds first well-documented pandemic, occurring as modern germ theory rose to prominence and miasma theory dispelled, ushering in the era of modern medical science and public health.

A quick check of the textbooksthe few that actually mention the thingwill inform you that the pandemic, which killed an estimated 1 million worldwide, lasted from 1889 to 1890.

Experts will tell you it likely hung around much longerand might still lurk, in some form, today.

Predating the now oft-discussed Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million worldwide, the Russian Flu likely wasnt a flu at all, some contend.

Instead, its symptoms more closely resemble a coronavirusa category of viruses named for their crown-like appearance under a microscope, of which COVID-19 is a member.

Coronaviruses typically cause mild to moderate upper-respiratory infections in humans and are responsible for a handful of common colds. But some have turned deadly, including COVID-19; SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome), an epidemic that emerged in 2002 and killed hundreds; and MERS (Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome), another epidemic that emerged in 2012 and killed hundreds.

The epidemiology and clinical symptoms of the Russian Flu are much more in line with COVID than what we know about influenza pandemics, said Dr. Harald Bruessow, editor of Microbial Biotechnology and a guest professor at KU Leuven in Belgium who has studied and published extensively on the esoteric ailment.

You have respiratory infection, but at the same time there are strong neurologic symptoms, he said of both the Russian Flu and COVID. Theres also something like Long COVID that was observed following the Russian Flu pandemic. These people were incapacitated for a really long time, with an increase in suicide rate and an inability to return to full work capacity.

Story continues

All this stuff makes one think that one is dealing with a coronavirus infection in the 1880s.

Lets say the so-called Russian Flu was a coronavirus. Does it serve as a better lens through which to view the current pandemic than the Spanish Flu? What lessons can we learn? Does it offer any clues to how the COVID-19 pandemic might endor linger, rather, as viruses tend to?

"If we say maybe the Russian Flu went extinct by a deus ex machina event, the odds are much lower for COVID," Dr. Arijit Chakravarty, Fractal Therapeutics CEO and COVID researcher, told Fortune.

"We're past that point."

When "nobody really dared to predict the trajectory of the COVID pandemic, how it will develop or end"frustrated by short-term computer simulations with a tendency toward inaccuracyand looking to glimpse into a COVID-19 crystal ball, Bruessow turned to the past.

What pandemic might serve as the best paradigm for COVID? He first examined the Spanish Flubut that was a different virus, he reasoned. Traveling backward in history from there, his options were limited, with the Russian Flu being the next chronological optionand, ironically, the first pandemic for which data was collected en masse.

As it turns out, it was a great fit.

The Russian Flu was actually the best case I could figure out of a respiratory pandemic of a comparable size to COVID that was sufficiently medically documented, Bruessow said of the disease, thought to have originated in cattle in Turkestan before enveloping the Russian empire and sweeping the world.

While considered a flu at the time, scientists did not yet have a solid grasp on what caused disease, with germ theory arising nearly simultaneously and duking it out with the miasma theory, the pre-scientific notion that disease was caused by "bad air" rising from the ground.

In one of his articles on the ailment, Bruessow refers to a 344-page doctors report from 1891 London, which describes Russian Flu patients as suffering from a hard, dry cough, fevers of 100-105 degrees, frontal headache of special severity, pains in the eyeballs, general feeling of misery and weakness, and great depression of spirits, and weeping, nervous restlessness, inability to sleep, and occasional delirium.

As with COVID, children seemed relatively spared, often only mildly affected, if they fell ill at all. Those who were elderlyin addition to those with pre-existing conditions like heart disease, tuberculosis, or diabeteswere more apt to take a fatal course, Bruessow wrote.

And theres more: Nearly 10% of cases saw continued symptoms, referred to by European doctors of the time as long enduring evil effects.

As with COVID, it was noted that patients were likely infectious before developing symptoms, and were occasionally reinfected, as was the case with a patient who fell ill with the flu in December 1889 in France, and then again a month later in January 1890 in England.

Dr. Tom Ewing, a history professor and associate dean at Virginia Tech who has published extensively on the topic, considered the Russian Flu an apt comparison during the first three months of the COVID pandemic due to its quick spread and global efforts to track symptoms.

He now considers the Spanish Flu to be a better comparison due to the body count: It's thought to have killed about 650,000 people in the U.S. in eight months, and COVID has killed nearly a million in the U.S. in a little over two years. In contrast, the Russian Flu is thought to have killed a million worldwide, in sum.

"I think where the useful comparisons are is, how do people react?" Ewing said. "How do they respond to first reports? How do physicians deal with a new threatening scale of disease? What we're all living with right nowat what point do you say it's all over?

The Russian Flu is typically considered to have lasted from 1889 through 1890, but in reality, it lasted much longerthrough 1894, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health National Library of Medicineand nearly a decade, depending on whom you talk to. Major mortality peaks, as seen in public health data from the United Kingdom, continued through 1899 or 1900, Bruessow said, adding that the mortality peaks in England during that period are nearly as high as they were during what was likely the first phase of the Russian Flu.

It is unknown if later deaths were from additional waves of the Russian Flu or something else. But reports of symptoms from potential later waves, found in The Lancet and other British medical journals, are strikingly similar, and contemporary researchers were formulating the suspicion of an up-flair, he said.

All this makes me think that we should consider the possibility that the Russian Flu agent was evolving and hanging around and even causing a major mortality peak in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, he concluded.

While its unknown if the Russian Flu was indeed a coronavirus, some believe it lives on today as OC43, a common human coronavirus that often causes upper-respiratory track illness, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While its presentation is often mild, the pathogen is known to cause bronchitis, bronchiolitis, and pneumonia in children and the elderly, as well as immunosuppressed patients, and its presentation may be easily confused with that of COVID-19, according to a 2021 article in The Southwest Respiratory and Critical Care Chronicles.

The thought that the Russian Flu endures as OC43 is a fascinating hypothesis, developed when scientists realized how genetically similar OC43 is to bovine coronavirus and projected a common ancestor arising around 1890the Russian Flu era, and a time of major cattle pandemics that may have spread to humans.

If theyre correct, the Russian Flu is still circulating, and it's still occasionally deadlya 2021 study published in Naturefound a 9.1% mortality rate for those hospitalized with confirmed cases of OC43, though it only tracked 77 patients between 2012 and 2017 at one Korean hospital.

The Russian Flu may indeed be "still killing people off, and we're just not paying attention to it, which is totally plausible," Chakravarty said. "We used to think the Epstein-Barr Virus was harmless," and now we know it raises the risk of developing multiple sclerosis by more than 30 times.

"There's a lot of sort of 'dark matter' in the infectious disease world that we haven't fully mapped out."

Such a future may await COVID, Bruessow contends.

This is what virologists working in the viral evolution field are thinking we should expect from SARS-CoV2, he said regarding the potential of COVID to persist well into the future. Some people think the Omicron variant that dominates now is already going a bit in this direction, because this variant is much less affecting the lung and much more targeting the upper respiratory tract.

Bruessow hopes Omicron is the last hoorah of COVID-19s acute phasethe Russian Flus lasted about three yearsbut hes well aware this may not be the case.

Personally, I would be a bit skeptical that Omicron would be the end of this, he said. The virus will still occupy our societies for a while.

Even if the Russian Flu eventually became less severe, theres no reason to necessarily think COVID-19 will go the same route, Bruessow cautions, nor is the Russian Flu's presumed attenuation necessarily permanent.

Viral evolution is really neutral with respect to virulence," he said. "The indication is that [COVID-19] will try to escape from the immune response, simply to infect the maximum number of people, and the virus with the highest efficiency will replace less efficient viral types.

This is the dynamic we are seeing, of increasing transmission. Theres no guarantee that the next wave wont be a virus that has, once again, increased virulence, like Delta.

Among Chakravarty's take-aways from the Russian Flu: "The body count can still pile up" over several years, even if a disease isn't incredibly transmissible and has a relatively low fatality rate, as was the case with the Russian Flu.

Even so, "mortality bounced around," he said. "There wasn't a steady decrease toward endemicity."

Regardless, COVID is "much more contagious" than the Russian Flu was, Chakravarty cautionsand the world is much better connected than it was in the industrial era, allowing for greater ease of disease spread.

COVID has a "screamingly high" transmission rateone person with Omicron infects, on average, eight to nine others, making it nearly as infectious as mumpsand the duration of immunity is low, he cautioned.

"You can sneeze in Wuhan in the morning and someone can be really ill the next day in Frankfurt."

The potential Russian Flu wave of 1900 is the last mention of the illness Bruessow sees in medical literature. There seem to have been seasonal, legitimate influenza outbreaks up until the onset of the Spanish Flu in 1918, after which major respiratory pandemics were all influenza related.

After that, theres no indication of a coronavirus causing a major epidemic in the 20th century," he said.

It's possible that a "very mild" coronavirus continued to circulate throughout the 20th century but was less impactful due to improvements in public health and quality of life, Ewing said.

During the early 20th century "health was getting better, mortality rates were decreasing, life expectancy was going up." This, in addition to tuberculous public health campaigns encouraging people to beware of coughing, sneezing, and spitting in public, may have blunted any circulating coronaviruses, he said.

While the Spanish Flu may not be the best lens through which to view COVID-19, it does contain pertinent lessons, Bruessow contends.

While the Spanish Flu is generally thought to have subsided in 1919 after three waves, later waves occurred periodically in the late 1920s into the 1940ssome as virulent as the initial Spanish Flu, with even higher mortality, he contends.

As U.S. COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci and colleagues pointed out in a 2009 New England Journal of Medicine article, "It is not generally appreciated that descendants of the H1N1 influenza A virus that caused the catastrophic and historic pandemic of 1918-1919 have persisted in humans for more than 90 [now 100] years and have continued to contribute their genes to new viruses, causing new pandemics," including the 2009 H1N1 "swine flu."

"We are living in a pandemic era that began around 1918," they wrote 13 years agolong before the advent of COVID-19.

Bruessow agrees with Fauci and his colleagues that viruses do not simply disappear."

"They change and hopefully they adapt and behave," Bruessow said. "But there are still some escapes, and we might see a return with higher virulence. Vigilance is indicated.

Chakravarty is of a similar mindset but cautions that one can't draw too many inferences from any particular pandemic, regardless of similarities.

"Each new pandemic, new plague is a new chapter in the history books," he said. "Your mileage may vary."

But one thing remains constant.

"There's no two-year timeline for pandemics," he warned.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Read more from the original source:

Curious if, or when, COVID-19 will end? Meet the Russian Flu, a forgotten pandemic from the late 1800s that might still linger today - Yahoo Finance