|
I lived in New Zealand for about a decade, and so things from and about NZ tend to catch my eye. This one sure did – it’s a lecture given in 2005 by Canterbury University history professor, Geoffery Rice. Prof Rice published a book about the 1918 flu; it's called Black November. This lecture is a synopsis of his book as it relates to the experiences of this small city in NZ during Nov. 1918.
The complete lecture is posted on FluTrackers. http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19396
If you want to get an idea of what the near future looks like, this is mandatory reading.
For those who keep asking what the "worst case" scenario looks like; it looks like this. And for the brain-dead mouth monkeys who keep reminding us that the present H1N1 is "mild" because so few people are dying, the population death rate in C'church was "only" 0.5%.
Prof. Rice's lecture is half about how Christchurch handled the 1918 flu and half about NZ’s current pandemic plans. To me, it brings home two important lessons: first, how fast the second wave of the 1918 flu came on and ravaged communities, and, second, how utterly poorly prepared we are to deal with a similar pandemic today, both at the personal level and at the governmental level.
Just some background for those of you who have not yet been to NZ. Christchurch is the main city on the South Island. It’s on the east coast, about halfway down the island in an area called Canterbury. In 1918 it was pretty well isolated from the world, and even from the main cities of NZ, Auckland near the top of the North Island, and Wellington, at the bottom of the North Island.
Remember, November is late spring in NZ; schools are just about to close for the summer holiday, which is what Prof. Rice is referring to when he talks about the longest school holiday ever.
To the extent that Santayana's quip is true about learning from the past or repeating it, we are in a world of trouble because we have, apparently, not learned anything from the 1918 experience.
Here are a few excerpts from the lecture – remember this lecture was given three years before the present pandemic broke out. Much of it sounds like he’s describing the last 6 months:
“One thing that interested me about the 1918 flu was the huge impact it must have had on young families, because that 1918 flu was a bit of a freak among influenza pandemics. Influenza normally only kills the very young or the very old. But the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918 preferred young adults in the prime of life, aged between 25 and 45. We still don’t know exactly why it behaved this way. Now that we know its genetic structure, that H1N1 virus looks very ordinary. It was actually closer to swine flu than avian flu, but that’s another story.”
“A lot of people here in Christchurch were talking about influenza during October 1918, but they were in the tail-end of the mild first wave of the pandemic. There was a serious flu outbreak among the boarders at Christ’s College in October with 127 boys ill, some with pneumonia, but there were no deaths. A dozen nurses at Christchurch Hospital came down with flu, and there was a lot of absenteeism at the Post Office and among tramway staff.”
[The second wave of the flu started in C’church on Nov11, 1918.] “At Christchurch Hospital flu admissions doubled in three days to reach 145 by 14 November, with half of the nurses down with flu. The situation was grim, but it was never the complete shambles that some critics later alleged. The hospital was lucky that Dr Fox, the medical superintendent, had caught the mild flu in October, and seemed immune to the severe second wave. Later in November he collapsed from overwork and exhaustion, but there was someone else to take his place.”
“By mid-November Christchurch was really in the grip of the flu. So many people took to their beds that shops and offices and factories either adopted reduced hours or closed completely. One man I interviewed said he stood in Colombo Street at the height of the flu and he could have fired a gun either way and would not have hit a soul. The streets were deserted and the whole city became like a ghost town.”
“St John Ambulance had just two motor ambulances in Christchurch in 1918, so the city council requisitioned vans from drapery firms like Beaths and Ballantynes to collect stretcher cases. The Canterbury Automobile Association was one of the largest and most active in NZ in 1918, and no fewer than 264 members offered their cars, and themselves as drivers. The central bureau allotted half a dozen cars to each depot. At first it was all a bit chaotic, but the idea of the block system was to prevent overlapping and waste of time and effort. The doctors were each assigned to a block and asked to go to the houses where flu cases were found, and most of Christchurch’s doctors were happy to work within this system.” [Hullo? Has the government today made any plans at all to get doctors to houses where the sick will be? No. It will be the same lame system we have now where you go to ER and sit there for hours until you are seen or die.]
“After the peak of deaths on the 19th, the death toll dropped away sharply and was down to single figures by the start of December. The worst mortality had occupied just three weeks. . . The final death toll for Christchurch was 458. That gives a death rate of 4.9 per thousand, or just under half of one per cent. Wellington was nearly 8 per thousand, and Auckland 7.6 per thousand. Dunedin got off quite lightly, with only 3.9 per thousand. Christchurch’s death rate was well below the national average for the European population of 5.8 per thousand.”
“Once the initial medical emergency was over, of finding the worst pneumonic cases and getting them to hospital, there was a different sort of crisis facing the city. There were thousands of people recovering from the flu, who were still too weak to look after themselves. . . That was a nasty virus in 1918: survivors told me that it left them feeling as weak as a kitten for a long time afterwards. Some people had lost all their hair and fingernails from the high fevers, or had huge nosebleeds or vomited blood. They were the lucky ones who survived. But the survivors now had to be fed. Relief workers found many households with empty cupboards. In those days before any unemployment benefit, with the breadwinner off work, there were no wages coming in and no food being bought.”
|