From 1889 to 1890, Russia faced one of the biggest pandemics in the world, the so-called russian flu.

The first historically recorded outbreak began in Bukhara, present-day Uzbekistan, and spread very quickly.

In three months, it was already traveling through Europe, Asia, Africa and America, causing bouts of pneumonia and fever.

In Brazil, it was even left to Emperor D. Pedro II, who suffered from Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky's land virus.

To get an idea of the dimension of the severity of the disease, the Russian flu led to the death of one million to one and a half million people, of which 200 to 300 thousand in Europe alone.

Unlike most pandemics whose population at risk are the elderly and people with comorbidities, which is the case with COVID-19, this virus mainly affected children and young people.

An interesting observation is that the Russian flu was the first thoroughly documented pandemic in human history.