Some scientists believe the illness, called "Russian flu," was caused by a pandemic coronavirus similar to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
The New York Times reports that in 1889, a strange respiratory sickness appeared in Russia and subsequently spread over the world, causing at least three waves of infection over the course of many years.
According to extant historical sources, which include official health records, newspapers, and journal articles, the Russian flu seems to kill considerably more elderly people than children, in contrast to influenza viruses, which tend to be equally fatal to both age groups.
Between the two pandemics, there are some obvious commonalities and parallels. During the Russian flu pandemic, for example, schools and businesses were forced to close due to the large number of persons infected. Infected people often lost their senses of taste and smell, and other people experienced long-term symptoms that lasted months, similar to COVID-19.
While these characteristics of the Russian flu pandemic are strikingly similar to those of the current pandemic, Peter Palese, a flu researcher and professor of medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, told The New York Times that the idea that the Russian flu was caused by a coronavirus is still speculative.
Some experts agreed while others believe that while there may be hard evidence to support the theory, it has yet to be discovered.
According to the New York Times, Dr. Scott Podolsky, a professor of global health and social medicine at Harvard Medical School, and Dominic W. Hall, curator of the Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard, are hunting for conserved lung tissue from the same time period.
Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases' viral pathogenesis and evolution division, and John Oxford, emeritus professor of virology at Queen Mary, University of London, are also looking for such evidence.
They've been looking for remnants of influenza viruses and coronaviruses in preserved lung tissue samples dating back to the 1918 flu pandemic. They expect to find the elusive Russian flu virus among these tissues.
If genetic evidence from the Russian flu virus is found in these lungs, it could provide insight into how the pandemic ended, as news coverage at the time was sparse.
And, if a coronavirus was responsible for the late-19th-century pandemic, some scientists believe the virus is still circulating as one of the four coronaviruses that cause the common cold rather than severe disease.
