1889–1890 pandemic

The 1889–1890 pandemic, often referred to as the "Asiatic flu" or "Russian flu", was a worldwide respiratory viral pandemic. It was the last great pandemic of the 19th century, and is among the deadliest pandemics in history. The pandemic killed about 1 million people out of a world population of about 1.5 billion (0.067% of population). The most reported effects of the pandemic took place from October 1889 to December 1890, with recurrences in March to June 1891, November 1891 to June 1892, the northern winter of 1893–1894, and early 1895. According to researchers' estimates, excess mortality from Russian influenza in the Russian Empire for the period 1889-1890 could be from 60,000 to 90,000 people, with lethality from the virus, a little more than 0.2%. Although contemporaries described the pandemic as influenza and 20th-century scholars identified several influenza strains as the possible pathogen, several authors from the early 2020s suggest that it may have been caused by human coronavirus OC43. Modern transport infrastructure assisted the spread of the 1889 pandemic. The 19 largest European countries, including the Russian Empire, had about 200,000 km of railroads, and transatlantic travel by sea took less than six days (not significantly different from current travel time by air, given the timescale of the global spread of a pandemic). It was the first pandemic to spread not just through a region such as Eurasia, but worldwide. It is conventionally believed that the disease was first reported in the Central Asian city of Bukhara in the Russian Empire (modern Uzbekistan) in May 1889. This goes back to publications of a local physician and follower of the miasma theory Oskar Heyfelder, who ignored the lack of catarrhal symptoms in the outbreak. Both a local independent commission of four doctors in August 1889 and historians in 2023 identified the infectious agent in Bukhara from May to August 1889 as not influenza, but malaria, which is endemic in the region, and the latter suggested anomalously cold and snowy winter and anomalously high ground water levels as possible reasons for the severeness of the outbeak.