INTERVIEW
Looking Ahead Why history suggests COVID-19 is here to stay By Anthony King
A mysterious flu-like illness that caused loss of taste and smell in the late 19th century was probably caused by a coronavirus that still causes the ‘common cold’ in people today, according to Professor Marc Van Ranst at KU Leuven in Belgium, an expert on coronaviruses. Prof. Van Ranst is involved in two EU-funded projects: MiCoBion – Microbial Communities in Biomedical and Environmental Areas, and Systems Biology, as well as HONOURs, a training network on host switching pathogens, infectious outbreaks and zoonosis. He says that the foothold of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the human population today means it is likely to follow a similar pattern and become a continuously circulating, or ‘endemic’ virus, joining four other human coronaviruses that infect people with common cold symptoms.
Could you tell us about your work showing that a coronavirus called OC43 may have caused the ‘Russian flu’ pandemic of the 1890s, which spread from St Petersburg across Europe to the US?
“All the ingredients are there to have this virus become an endemic coronavirus.” Prof. Marc Van Ranst, KU Leuven, Belgium
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April 2021
Yes, the first study was in 2005. We redid the genetic analysis (of OC43 evolution) to see at what point the bovine and the human viruses started to diverge (which indicates OC43 jumped species) and we found exactly the same date (as the Russian flu epidemic). Even at the time people were debating about the cause of this weird flu, though they
