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Covid Compared to Other Pandemics

The five well-documented influenza pandemics of the past 130 years offer some blueprint for how Covid might play out, according to Lone Simonsen, an epidemiologist and professor of population health sciences at Roskilde University in Denmark. She is an expert on the ebb and flow of such events.

History shows the commonly held belief that viruses automatically get milder over time — to avoid completely wiping out their host population — is wrong, according to Simonsen. Although new mutations aren’t always more severe than their predecessors, “pandemics can in fact get more deadly during the pandemic period, as the virus is adapting to its new host,” she said.

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Coronaviruses have a “proof-reading” mechanism that fixes the in-born errors caused when the virus replicates, reducing the likelihood of variants emerging when the virus is transmitted from one person to another.

The number of global cases has been so vast, however, that mutations are occurring anyway.

[Accelerated in immunocompromised patients]

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