Professor analyzes Spanish Flu history, compares second wave to COVID-19

Discussion around a second wave of COVID-19 is largely factually incorrect, according to one historical epidemic expert.

Dr. Mark Humphries, a professor of history at Wilfrid Laurier University and author of The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health in Canada, joined Gormley on Monday to break down the differences between the Spanish Flu and the new coronavirus.

When most people refer to a potential second wave of COVID-19, Humphries believes they’re pointing to a possible bump in case numbers due to reopening processes. However, that’s not how the different waves worked back during the Spanish Flu pandemic.

“The first wave of the flu spreads around the world in the spring of 1918. If you look at the medical journals of the time, it largely goes unnoticed … Basically, had that wave been it, people probably would have forgotten about the flu and it would have just gone down as a bad flu year,” he explained.

“What happens in the summer of 1918 is the virus actually mutates and changes. It becomes far more virulent, meaning that it spreads more easily between people and it tends to kill more people as well. That’s what we call the second wave.”

However, that pattern can’t necessarily be applied to the current pandemic. Humphries said coronaviruses in general have many key differences from influenza.

“We haven’t paid much attention to (coronaviruses) before. So, the problem is, we don’t really know what’s going to happen. This virus sometimes behaves like influenza, and in other ways, it doesn’t. One of the ways it doesn’t behave like influenza is that it doesn’t mutate nearly as quickly,” he explained.

“It’s likely that it will continue to reverberate around the globe for some time. But whether or not you get that changed virus that would make it more or less deadly is a different story.”

In order to meet the requirements for a second wave, a very specific scenario would have to apply.

“A real second wave would be a situation where the virus moves its way through the population, then largely disappears for a period of time, before being reintroduced and then spiking again,” Humphries said.

You can hear the entire interview with Humphries on ckom.com or cjme.com at the On Demand banner.