Is COVID-19 Really the First Coronavirus Pandemic?

Photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash

Headaches. Loss of smell and taste. Extended fatigue after initial infection. Frequent relapses. Cases of depression, insomnia, and even psychosis. People self-medicating with quinine. A disease which primarily strikes the old and those with underlying conditions.

No, I’m not describing COVID-19, I’m talking about the 1889–1890 Russian “flu.” And yes, quinine, the ancestor of hydroxychloroquine, enters the picture too. Because history, I guess.

The Fight Over Russian Flu

Seroarchaeologists, who attempted to identify the strain causing Russian flu by studying the immune systems of elderly people who would have been exposed, think that the Russian influenza, which infected a good chunkof St. Petersburg before expanding along rail routes to kill a million people worldwide, was an H3 strain of the flu.

But there’s an alternative theory, circulating since 2005. This theory centers on two things:

1. The symptoms listed, which, as we all now know, are not so strongly associated with flu.
2. An epidemic of bovine pneumonia that preceded the pandemic.

Enter OC43. OC43 is an endemic human coronavirus. We’ve all probably had it at some point. Of the four coronaviruses that cause the common cold, it’s the…