COVID-19 and Swine Flu: What makes them so different from each other?

For eons, pandemics have terrorized human lives and disrupted the normal functioning of societies. Even after major technological breakthroughs, it continues to drastically affect our lives in tthe worst possible ways.

The outbreak of coronavirus has not only left people in a state of panic, but also compelled scientists and medical researchers to go out of their way to find a suitable vaccine and/or a possible solution to contain the spread of the virus.

In doing so, COVID-19 has been repeatedly compared with other major pandemics, especially swine flu. While these two viruses have much in common - in terms of symptoms and diagnoses - there's a lot that differentiates them from one another.

Prior to COVID-19, swine flu was the last major pandemic that wreaked havoc in many parts of the world. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it was a novel influenza A (H1N1) virus that emerged in the spring of 2009. As against it, COVID-19 is a novel coronavirus, which is a new strain of virus previously unidentified in humans.

Originally detected in the US, swine flu was a fusion of flu genes that hadn't been previously seen in animals or people. However, over time, it has been recognized as just another seasonal influenza strain.

While the 2009 outbreak of swine flu was the second H1N1 pandemic in the world - the first being the 1918 Spanish flu, still one of the most deadly pandemics in history, COVID-19 is a novel coronavirus that has never been detected in humans before. The mortality rate for the COVID-19 is much higher than swine flu. While the novel coronavirus affects older people and people with prior medical conditions more severely, swine flu primarily affected children and young adults.

As recorded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of people infected by swine flu in 2009 was up to 60.8 million people. Comparatively, the number of infected and death counts are much higher in the case of coronavirus.

In addition to that, the reproductive number, which is the number of secondary infections generated from one infected individual, for COVID-19 is higher than that of H1N1 flu, which makes the former more contagious and dangerous.

Although the two diseases are completely different from one another, their symptoms can seem astonishingly similar. According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the symptoms of swine flu in people are similar to symptoms of other strains of the flu. Fever, cough, sore throat, body aches and fatigue are some of the most common symptoms of swine flu.

That being said, COVID-19 also come with a range of symptoms, but according to CDC, the most common of them are fever or chills, dry cough, shortness of breath, fatigue, runny nose, sore throat, headache and loss of sense of taste or smell.

As the two diseases have similar symptoms, doctors and medical researchers find it difficult to differentiate between the two, which makes the process of diagnosis not only very difficult but also very important.

Both COVID-19 and swine flu are diagnosed with similar forms of testing too i.e. with the help of a nasopharyngeal swab, an oropharyngeal swab and a nasopharyngeal wash. Additionally, there are rapid test for both COVID-19 and the flu, which can deliver results within hours.

As of now, there have been no major successes in developing a treatment or a clinically approved vaccine for COVID-19. However, scientists and researchers are working tirelessly in containing the spread of the virus and finding a possible solution. In opposition to that, swine flu is treated as a part of the annual flu. That means that the H1N1 flu is cured with flu vaccines and can also be treated with anti-viral medications.