Second wave of coronavirus could be more deadly, experts warn. What does history say?
Word on the street is, the “inevitable” second wave of the coronavirus pandemic could be more deadly than the first, according to health officials, but that depends on how well the U.S. continues to enforce countermeasures like social distancing.
If it’s anything like the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, the new coronavirus could come back to haunt us in more devastating ways.
Why? Because the second wave could be coupled with the seasonal flu, which would exhaust hospital resources even more than they are now, experts warn.
“There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield told the Washington Post. “We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time.”
In a subsequent statement during a White House briefing, Redfield said he wanted to clarify his comments, according to Live Science: “”I think it’s really important to emphasize what I didn’t say. I didn’t say [the next wave of COVID-19] was going to be worse. I said it was going to be more difficult and potentially complicated because we’ll have flu and coronavirus circulating at the same time.”
If states lift restrictions too early, which has already begun, a second wave of the virus could “get us right back in the same boat that we were a few weeks ago,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading epidemiologist, according to CNN.
“If by that time we have put into place all of the countermeasures that you need to address this, we should do reasonably well,” Fauci said. “If we don’t do that successfully, we could be in for a bad fall and a bad winter.”
Waves of past pandemics
As of April 29, there are more than 3 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, and more than 218,000 deaths.
In comparison, the Spanish flu pandemic infected 500 million people globally and killed about 20 to 50 million — “that’s more than all of the soldiers and civilians killed during World War I combined,” History.com said. Death counts are uncertain however, several experts have warned.
“Experts agree the Spanish flu occurred in multiple waves and that the second wave was significantly more deadly than the others. But it is false to attribute a specific number of deaths to each wave. Because of the lack of comprehensive medical records from 1918-20, there is not enough evidence to conclude an accurate number of deaths in any of the waves of the pandemic,” according to USA Today.
The second wave of the Spanish flu, however, is what made it the most deadly disease outbreak in history, likely because infections were frequently joined by another bacterial infection, pneumonia, that attacked the respiratory system, Vox reported.
The H1N1 pandemic, or the swine flu, also had more devastating waves later on, studies show.
Pneumonia, a lung infection that makes it hard to breath, is also a common complication from COVID-19, the disease the virus causes, and has been the cause of many fatalities.
If history speaks for itself, COVID-19 and its associated pneumonia together with the seasonal flu could prove devastating.
What experts predict for coronavirus
Redfield pointed out that if the new coronavirus arrived at the peak of winter flu season, then the pandemic “could have been really difficult,” according to BBC.
Others are on the fence.
“I don’t know if it will be worse, I think this has been pretty bad,” White House coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx said, according to CNN. “When you see what happened in New York, that was very bad.”
Some health experts caution against comparing the new coronavirus to the Spanish flu.
The underlying diseases and case fatalities are different, Vox said. Antibiotics were 10 years from being developed at the time of the 1918 outbreak, and widespread global travel, which aids in the spread of disease, simply did not exist, the outlet reported.
“What’s most striking about these comparisons … is not the similarities between the two episodes, but the distance that medicine has traveled in the intervening century,” flu expert Jeremy Brown wrote in The Atlantic.
Even though there are vaccines available for the seasonal flu, it still remains deadly, CNN said.
Having more people vaccinated for the flu, however, “may allow there to be a hospital bed available for your mother or grandmother that may get coronavirus,” said Redfield, according to CNN.
This story was originally published April 29, 2020 at 9:54 AM with the headline "Second wave of coronavirus could be more deadly, experts warn. What does history say?."
