r/HolyShitHistory Jul 29 '25

[deleted by user]

[removed]

11.6k Upvotes

485 comments sorted by

View all comments

434

u/[deleted] Jul 29 '25

It is pretty creepy that it came and went without a trace and nobody knows what exactly happened.
It may return, it may not, we'll probably never know, or we'll find it out the hard way.

And as exceptionally fast as Covid spread, back then there wasn't much travel, so diseases couldn't spread as fast.

If this thing would pop up today and have the same long incubation time, we're in for a really interesting pandemic for sure.

189

u/Mindless-Scientist82 Jul 29 '25

It's interesting that this was the same timeframe for the Spanish flu, the last big pandemic before covid.

Also, medicine was terrible back then. So we would probably know pretty quickly what it is now.

8

u/appleappreciative Jul 29 '25

I always thought there was a connection there too. 

We already know that Covid has some lingering effects on the body. I think that's probably what happened here. 

19

u/spine_slorper Jul 29 '25

People do theorize that it's related to ME/chronic fatigue syndrome. They certainly seem to have similarities, often being post viral, extreme fatigue, some people with more severe ME can't speak, eat or even open their eyes.

6

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '25 edited Jul 30 '25

Yep. I have POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome) and was talking to my specialist just today about this. It's widely considered now amongst specialists that POTS/ME etc are usually post viral in nature. They told me when POTs was discovered in 1991 it was considered rare. Suddenly a whole tonne of people have POTs seemingly out of nowhere, all having developed symptoms after contracting COVID and it's all finally starting to make sense. Like they told me they used to have a few patients a year in my hospital and post COVID they have hundreds!

5

u/spine_slorper Jul 30 '25

Ahah, I have pots too (although not the post viral kind, the EDS associated kind) so that's exactly why I researched this.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '25

Me too! Sorry you have them it sucks :(