Page 4 - July on-line VV_Neat

A deadly virus hit war-wracked Kent 100 years ago
By Richard Thompstone

How can we possibly imagine the fear brought by the Spanish
flu pandemic of 1918-1919 to a country already flattened by
four years of horrific warfare and loss?

Without our modern health care and co-ordinated approach,
people must have felt completely powerless. But there are
similarities between that pandemic and the coronavirus – not
least in the potential positive outcomes. And as you can see
from the American poster on the right, the advice in some
quarters was remarkably similar.

During 1918-19, the flu infected a third of the population of
Britain in three waves, killing 228,000 people. Globally it was
the most devastating pandemic on record, with up to 100
million people dying from it in a single year.
Spanish flu, though not originating in Spain, was so named
because the first reported cases came from there. The disease
probably arrived in Britain with troops returning home by boat
and train at the end of the First World War. It quickly swept
across the country.
The first recorded case was at the port of Glasgow in May 1918. It reached London and Kent in June and seemed to be a
spent force by late August. However, it flared up in October, reaching every corner of the land before another moderate
outbreak early in 1919.
So many people were infected and so many died within a few weeks of the start of the outbreak that the burden on
medical staff and the funeral sector was immense, as was the accompanying economic and social disruption.

Unlike today, there was no National Health Service, only a fledgling welfare service and little co-ordination between countries
or even counties.

The stage was set for a disaster.
Health Services
Britons at that time had no National Health Service to call upon. Joined-up thinking on health care was lacking because in
this country, as throughout the industrialised world, most doctors worked for themselves or were funded by charities or
religious institutions.

Doctors weren’t obliged to report flu cases to any centralised body in 1918, so the authorities failed to see the pandemic
coming.
Most people had no access to any kind of health service. But even those rich or lucky enough to get to a doctor found that,
without the drugs and antibiotics we have today, there was little they could do. The lack of antibiotics meant patients had
no defence against secondary bacterial infections, such as pneumonia, that killed most victims.

The majority of British doctors were abroad in military service leaving only older practitioners who often lacked up-to-date
training and who were run off their feet.
Meanwhile, physicians around the world assumed they were dealing with a bacterial disease – virus was a novel concept in
1918. The speed at which the virus struck defied efforts to deal with it. People seemingly fit and healthy at breakfast could
be dead by the evening.
Social distancing

The UK welfare state, which in 2020 is strong enough financially to support people to stay at home, was in its infancy hav-
ing been introduced by Asquith’s Liberal government only a decade earlier.