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1889–1890 pandemic

Global pandemic

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Through Central Asia and Berlin

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.

Outbreak and spread

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 May 1889 in the Central Asian city of Bukhara (modern Uzbekistan), then the capital of the Emirate of Bukhara, a protectorate of the Russian Empire. 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 an anomalously cold and snowy winter and anomalously high ground water levels as possible reasons for the severity of the outbreak.

Most likely the first outbreak of Russian flu occurred in Western Siberia – Tomsk province. It was preceded by an epizootic of pneumonia in cattle.

It is also conventionally believed that the newly built Trans-Caspian railway enabled the disease to spread farther into Samarkand by August, and Tomsk, 3,200 km (2,000 mi) away, by October. However, the Russian military had not detected any flu in Samarkand in August, and, despite a significant military presence along the railway, the first flu cases were not diagnosed in the Turkestan Military District at all until late November.

Despite the fact that the Trans-Siberian Railway had not yet been constructed (which is often cited as the reason for slow transmission of the virus to European Russia), the anomalous rise in flu cases was detected in the military in the second half of October from multiple European cities all the way to 108th meridian east.

By November the pandemic had reached Saint Petersburg (infecting 180,000 of the city's under one million inhabitants) and Moscow. By mid-November Kyiv was infected, and the next month the Lake Baikal region was as well, followed by the rest of Siberia and Sakhalin by the end of the year.

From St. Petersburg, the infection spread via the Baltic shipping trade to Vaxholm in early November 1889, and then to Stockholm and the rest of Sweden, infecting 60% of the population within eight weeks. Norway, and then Denmark, followed soon after. The German Empire first received it in Posen in December, and on 12 November 600 workers were reported sick in Berlin and Spandau, with the cases in the city reaching 150,000 within a few days, and ultimately half of its 1.5 million inhabitants. Vienna was infected around the same time. Rome was reached by 17 December. The flu also arrived in Paris in December, and towards the end of the month had spread to Grenoble, Toulon, Toulouse and Lyon on the mainland, and Ajaccio on Corsica. At this point Spain was also infected, killing up to 300 a day in Madrid. It reached London at the same time, from where it spread quickly within Great Britain and Ireland to Birmingham, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Dublin.

The most satisfactory statistical data in the Russian Empire were observed in Livonia province. At the end of November 1889, the newspaper ‘Riga Herald’ reported: ‘Influenza has visited Riga - this is beyond any doubt. There are quite a lot of diseases, especially in places where many people are crowded together. By the way, the disease appeared in the non-commissioned officers' battalion.... Fortunately, the course of the disease is quite easy, but it is unpleasant in that it distracts the sick from classes’. Doctors - contemporaries of the epidemic - noted that after the peak of morbidity, pneumonia began to be observed, often leading to the death of the patient. ‘An accountant fell ill with Influenza, but paid no attention to it, and remained on his feet all the time; he died in three days with pneumonia. Yesterday they buried two ordinary workers, who also caught cold after Influenza and died on the fourth day’. Among the complications of the disease were prolonged weakness, adverse effects on cognitive ability, neuroses, otitis media, veins, lymphatic vessels and glands. Influenza affected members of all classes. From the middle of December 1889 the general morbidity of the population in the town began to decline, but the number of cases of pneumonia increased.The estimate of excess mortality in Livonia province in November 1889 showed an increase of 8 per cent in November 1889 and 67 per cent in December 1889, compared to the average for the seven-year period 1888–1895. The highest mortality was observed in the population over 35 years of age. Influenza also had an impact on fertility: the birth rate in September 1890 (conceived in December 1889) was the lowest for the period 1888 to 1895.

The first case on American soil was reported on 18 December 1889. It then quickly spread throughout the East Coast and all the way to Chicago and Kansas in days. The first American death, Thomas Smith of Canton, Massachusetts, was reported on 25 December. San Francisco and other cities were also reached before the month was over, with the total US death toll at about 13,000. From there it spread to Mexico and to South America, reaching Buenos Aires by 2 February.

India received it in February 1890, and Singapore and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) did by March. These were followed by Japan, Australia, and New Zealand by April, and then China in May; the infection continued to spread, reaching its original starting point in Central Asia.

Cases in Africa began to appear in port cities in late December 1889 and in January 1890, although there may have been an early outbreak in Durban, South Africa, in November 1889.

In four months it had spread throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Deaths peaked in Saint Petersburg on 1 December 1889, and in the United States during the week of 12 January 1890. The median time between the first reported case and peak mortality was five weeks. In Malta, the Asiatic flu took hold between January 1889 and March 1890, with a fatality rate of 4% (39 deaths), and a resurgence in January to May 1892 with 66 fatalities (3.3% case fatality rate). When this flu began, it was debated whether it was in fact a human-to-human contagious disease; its virulence and rapid spread across all climates and terrains demonstrated that it was.

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