I think it is worth sharing, as the similarities with COVID are interesting. Maybe I should underline that there is no definite proof that OC43, which is still around, was the culprit. 1888/1890 Pandemic .

 

I see this as glimmer of hope as it would show that we can indeed develop herd immunity, even without vaccines. But doctors seem to agree that to get there everyone must get exposed multiple times to the virus.

 

Thanks for posting.  It is interesting.  I'll see what I can find on it. 

 

My Great-grandmother was a young girl during the Great Blizzard of 1888.  I remember her talking about it during a blizzard which made it a much more interesting story for a youngster.  Another thing she mentioned was that it was a bad time and then they got hit with a bad flu that killed a lot of people.   I wonder if that would be the same flu that you are referring to that may, in fact, have been a coronavirus. 

 

Just for the sake of accuracy and something I later found out, the Great Blizzard of 1888 hit the East Coast but there was a previous blizzard that hit the northern and upper midwestern US states which was actually called the Schoolhouse Blizzard.  

 

It's certainly one theory that was widely reported in 2020 when older research from the early 2000's suggested that there is a most recent common ancestor between the Human Coronavirus OC43 and a Bovine Coronavirus dated to approximately 1890.

 

Here's some light reading on the subject : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC544107/

 

It's worth noting however that another team at University College London last year mentioned they dated the most recent common ancestor between the current bovine coronavirus and current human coronavirus OC43 to some time in the mid 20th century, I can't remember the decade but it was between the 40's and 60's from what I remember. They did publish this research but I don't know where, you can probably dig it up by searching for it.

 

Back in 1899 for a few years the disease that's called 'Russian Flu' was going around, there is no sample and it resembled 'a flu', something else to read up on are 'journals' written by Doctors back in the late 1890's, there's archived material by a Doctor working out of Dublin in Ireland who described the symptoms of the patients and they sound very familiar when you read the online copies of it....loss of tase and smell, etc. It sounds like he's describing COVID symptoms but 130 years before it hit.

 

Here's a link which has some snippets from the writings I'm talking about, written by Dr John Moore , it's very interesting : https://circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov/2014/08/15/a-physicians-perspective-on-the-russian-flu/

 

Here's one image from the page :

 

 

 

There are additional links on the above page which point to source material.

I think it is worth sharing, as the similarities with COVID are interesting. Maybe I should underline that there is no definite proof that OC43, which is still around, was the culprit. 1888/1890 Pandemic .

 

I see this as glimmer of hope as it would show that we can indeed develop herd immunity, even without vaccines. But doctors seem to agree that to get there everyone must get exposed multiple times to the virus.

 

Doctors also agree that infection without vaccination results in large numbers of unnecessary serious illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths.

 

 

15 minutes ago, Chomper Higgot said:

I see this as glimmer of hope

If you want to see a glimmer of hope look up what happened in Japan over the last few months.