Recalling Spanish flu, the worst pandemic in history

By Abdul Qadir Qureshi
(Pakistan News & Features Services)

While these lines are being written the new coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, having taken the world by storm, has had 3,894,487 cases, causing 269,251 deaths while 1,332,687 people have recovered.

The clocks seem have turned back because there was a similar kind of pandemic almost a century ago which had devastated the whole world. 

Although there may be just a few survivors of the Spanish flu, which started in 1918 and ended in 1920, it’s still talked about as the most feared pandemic in human history. Many people thought those days that the world was on the verge of extinction. 

The Spanish flu had infected one third of the world's population, causing about 50 to 100 million deaths, equal to 3% to 5% of the population. Around 50 to 100 million people had perished worldwide died within two years and there was hopelessness and darkness all around.

Historically it was in September 1918 when the first signs of the impending disaster. 

The World War I was coming to an end and the jubilant people had assembled in England’s city of Manchester to greet Prime Minister Lloyd George at Albert Square. 

There was buzz and excitement as the Allied victory was being celebrated. But the evening turned sour when the Prime Minister suddenly had a sore throat, a high fever and lost consciousness. 

For the next 10 days, Prime Minister Lloyd George was isolated in a hospital room in Manchester. He could not walk and had to wear a breathing tube. 

The British press then hid all information out of fear that the Germans might use this to propagate the coup. Only the people closest to him knew how seriously ill the Prime Minister was.

The 55-year-old Prime Minister was fortunate to have survived many days of treatment but his people were not so lucky. 150 people in Manchester were reported to have died in just one week.

In 1918, the Spanish flu had killed 250,000 Britons. Young men, who did not die under gunfire of enemies, were getting killed by an influenza pandemic. 

About a century later, another sitting British Prime Minister of the same age, Boris Johnson, has survived a similar virus again after being in a very critical situation. Once more the people of Britain have died in large numbers. 

Going back to history, it was in May 1918, when King Alfonso XIII of Spain became infected, everyone still considered the Spanish flu a normal illness. They even told each other to gargle with salt water and quarantine themselves until the fever is over.

No one could imagine that in just two years, this flu would infect one third of the world's population, killing three to five times the number of soldiers killed during World War I. 

In the US, 28% of the population was infected and 675,000 died. Many Native American tribes were greatly affected, and even the Inuit and Alaska Aboriginal tribes were completely wiped out. 

50,000 Canadians were killed, 300,000 Brazilian people have died from the Spanish flu, including contemporary President Coleues Alves. In the UK, more than 250,000 people died while this figure in France is more than 400,000. In Japan more than 300,000 people died while in Indonesia as many as 1.5 million lives were lost.

India, under the British rule, was one of the countries to suffer the most when more than 17 million people died from the Spanish flu, equivalent to 5% of the total population.

Even in isolated countries like Tahiti, Samoa, Australia and New Zealand, the death toll was enormous. 13% of Tahiti's population died within a month. In Samoa, 38,000 people, or 22% of the population, was wiped out while 12,000 New Zealanders died in just six weeks. 

In 1919, when antibiotics and vaccines were not yet born, many believed that the Spanish flu would be the destruction of mankind, something that the world war had just ended. 

Despite its name, the flu had not originated in Spain. Because of this sensitive time, the World War I had just ended, so the warring parties were hiding information about the disease, making the neutral Spain become the first place in the world for the infected cases to be made public. 

The Spanish influenza had an extremely high infection rate of up to 50% and a mortality rate of about 10%-20%, while other types of flu were only about 0.1%. In particular, the main death victim of this flu was young people, aged 20-40 years old, who seemed to have the strongest immune system. 

The manifestations of the disease were hemorrhages in the nose, stomach and intestines, followed by hemorrhage and pleural effusion, causing the patient to drown by the internal fluids of their body.