At the centre of the city a whistle blew, signalling the official end of four weeks of lockdown. Thousands of people tore off their gauze face masks and trampled them as they poured into the streets. Bars and theatres threw open their doors. The revellers ignored official calls to retain those masks.
Then a further wave of flu infections broke out that was far deadlier than what had come before. Ultimately, it left San Francisco with one of the highest death rates in the U.S. by the spring of 1919.
History shows how lethal disease pandemics have a habit of seeming to shrink away — but then returning suddenly in subsequent waves. Chillingly, these latter waves can prove far deadlier.
As British authorities try to plot a map for exiting lockdown from Covid-19, infectious disease experts are trying to fathom the deadly coronavirus's next move. Almost all agree on one stark reality: that the infection is bound to re-emerge in a second wave.
Last week, for example, Professor Jonathan Van Tam, deputy chief medical officer for England, warned at the Government's daily briefing that the virus will 'absolutely come back'.
But what will that second wave be like? When will it strike? And is there anything we can do to blunt its lethal edge? As one expert — Simon Clarke, an associate professor in cellular microbiology at the University of Reading — told Good Health: 'All these vital questions are at best the subject of educated guesswork.'
History does, however, provide us with fearsome lessons, in the form of the pandemics of the Spanish flu and before that, Russian flu, which swept the world at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th...<<<Read The Full Article Here>>>...
