The Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918, which claimed the lives of approximately 50 million people worldwide, is the maximum and not unusual point of comparison with the existing flagella of the coronavirus.
In some respects, according to a new study, the COVID-19 pandemic has been worse.
The study, published Thursday in the medical journal JAMA Network Open, compares the two months since the first recorded death of COVID-19 in New York, the epicenter of the U.S. epidemic. In weeks, with the deadliest two months of the calamity of 1918.
Although the number of New Yorkers consisting of 100,000 who died each month is equal to that of that time (287, particularly upwards from the 202 average from March 11 to May 11 this year), the deviation from the popular in 2020 is particularly upwards.
About one hundred New Yorkers for every hundred thousand died for all the reasons each and every month in the 4 years before the Spanish flu, a figure that almost tripled in October and November 1918, the peak of the pandemic in the city. .
This time, with more complex public health and health care systems that reduced the number of deaths to 50, according to a month consistent with 100,000 on the same dates from March to May in the last 3 years, the number of deaths quadrupled.
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This highlights the effect of a disease that some still minimize in part because about 40% of other inflamed people would possibly not increase symptoms.
“These are comparable occasions in terms of magnitude,” said Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and study director.
“I think we could possibly believe that pandemics, epidemics and other calamities are those kind of old occasions when the streets are covered in corpses and there’s plague and dirt, but what our numbers show is that what happened in New York was quite similar to what happened during the biggest fashion pandemic.’
Another expert who did not participate in the study came to a similar conclusion, noting that the new report includes the massive cost extracted through a virus that has inflamed some 5.2 million Americans and killed more than 165,000, in just seven months. An estimated 675,000 Americans died in the Spanish influenza pandemic.
“Gross population grades were higher for influenza, however, when adjustments in mortality rates due to healthier cities are taken into account in 2020, COVID has led to far more deaths above the main ones than the influenza pandemic,” said Dr Eric Cioe-Pea. Director of Global Health at Northwell Health in Long Island, New York. “A reminder of the severity of this pandemic and how temporarily this virus can kill.”
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Faust acknowledges that his report represents a case study that is necessarily applicable to other cities or to the rest of the country. This remains to be noticed as the coronavirus continues to spread and disrupt life across the country.
He noted that no one knows if we have noticed the worst or only a preamble to the damage that can be inflicted through the virus. Many public fitness experts are involved in the arrival of the flu season in autumn and winter, combined with the continued prevalence of coronavirus, can lead to catastrophic results.
Faust also warned against electronically infecting the COVID-19 epidemic with a bad flu season, such as those looking to minimize the danger posed by the new virus.
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In a JAMA article published on May 14, Faust and Dr. Carlos del Río, also co-author of the new study, noted that situations in hospitals treating coronavirus patients were much more severe than during a flu season. They also argued that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that flu-related deaths outperform them.
According to Faust’s estimate, the epidemic in the United States, with 25% of international COVID-19 instances and 22% of their deaths, is 20 times worse than a flu season.
“What we are living is actually historical and unusual, and we must not forget it,” Faust said. “We are used to a very low mortality rate and, for us, suddenly quadrupling, gives us a concept of the magnitude of the public health crisis we face.”