Could Coronavirus Turn Into the Next Spanish Flu?

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Some are trying — some are saying, reluctantly, that they see a sort of Spanish flu kind of type of catastrophe looming. Do you think that’s even possible? I mean, let’s face it, in 1918, the Spanish flu killed, I mean, 50 million people, that can’t happen now, can it? And in the last two breakouts, in ’57 and ’68, they killed about a million each. Just put that in perspective and put that to rest if you can.

TOM FRIEDEN, FORMER CDC DIRECTOR: We can say a few things. First, we don’t know all that we need to know about this virus. We still don’t know how readily it spreads. We still don’t know how deadly it is. We know that it spreads more readily than SARS but is less deadly than SARS. If you compare with the 1918 pandemic, I don’t see a scenario in which this particular coronavirus causes that kind of devastation. That was a worst- case scenario. It was the worst epidemic, pandemic of the last century, both the 1918 flu pandemic and the global pandemic of HIV killed tens of millions of people. We don’t see evidence that that is likely to happen in this case. A pandemic means it’s going to affect countries throughout the world. But whether it’s a severe pandemic, a moderately severe pandemic or mild pandemic, we still don’t know. We don’t know whether the thousands of deaths we’ve seen in China from coronavirus are among hundreds of thousands or even potentially millions of infections. And so, the actual risk of death is much lower or if it’s really very deadly. There’s a way of looking at this, a framework for looking at this, and the most likely comparisons are to the 1957 and 1968 flu pandemics, but that could change tomorrow. The information is just amazingly dynamic. Each day we learn more. Each day we may adjust what we know. And that means there are certain things that individuals in the community, health care facilities and governments need to do now to be prepared as they can be.