Comparing COVID-19 with previous pandemics

At the end of 2018, around 37.9 million people were living with HIV.Although HIV is also caused by a virus, there are significant differences between the two current pandemics; the most obvious being their means of transmission. Although there is no vaccine for HIV, thanks to antiretroviral medications, people who have access to care can now live long and healthy lives.According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between April 2009 and April 2010, the swine flu pandemic affected an estimated 60.8 million people. There were also around 274,304 hospitalizations and 12,469 deaths.Both swine flu and the novel coronavirus cause symptoms such as fever, chills, a cough, and headaches.Like SARS-CoV-2, the (H1N1)pdm09 virus was also significantly different from other strains. Because of this immunity, 80% of the fatalities occurred in people younger than 65.This is not the case with SARS-CoV-2; all age groups seem to be equally likely to contract it, and older adults are most at risk of developing severe illness. The virus killed around 675,000 people in the U.S. alone and approximately 50 million worldwide.This strain of influenza, like COVID-19, transmitted via respiratory droplets.As with COVID-19, older adults were most at risk of developing severe symptoms. This is unusual for flu.COVID-19, however, generally affects children in relatively minor ways, and adults aged 20–40 are significantly less likely to develop severe symptoms than older adults.As with swine flu, it may be that older adults at this time had a preexisting immunity to a similar pathogen. This is yet another factor that may have made people more susceptible to disease.Although the Spanish flu pandemic has many differences to today’s COVID-19 pandemic, it teaches us a valuable lesson about the effectiveness of quickly implementing physical distancing measures, or social distancing measures. People also started to hold fragrant handkerchiefs against their mouths when in public, and this might have reduced the risk of infection and transmission.Although there are significant differences between the pandemics above and COVID-19, there are some key takeaways here. In this feature, we dispel 24 of these myths.As the world faces a ventilator shortage, we examine the ethical implications of some of the hardest decisions to make during the COVID-19 pandemic.Three coronaviruses can cause severe respiratory illness in people.