Covid-19 outbreak reminds of personal accounts providing a story of pandemic flu 1918 individual suffering

Flu pandemic 1918   took five times as many lives as the War and preferably healthy young people, who died in 1-4 days after the first symptoms. [12]

When hospitals were filled to capacity, temporary emergency hospitals in schools, warehouses, and churches were set up [13].

The experience of one student nurse, who worked 12-hour shifts in a flu ward, in New York City hospitals, was typical: Almost overnight the hospital was inundated.… Wards were emptied hastily of patients convalescing from other ailments … and only emergency operations were performed. Vacations all cancelled … classes disrupted. … Care was mainly supportive: we gave heart and respiratory stimulants, or sedation as the condition dictated. A variety of cough medicines … were ordered. Camphor in oil and caffeine by hypo [hypodermic injection] were in constant use, and we were forever balancing the advantages of forcing fluids against the disadvantages of edema, as kidneys or heart became overtaxed and the lungs showed congestion. … Victims came on stretchers…their faces and nails as blue as huckleberries.” [14]

 In many families, more than one member was ill and, when both parents succumbed to the flu, the nurses not only had to care for the sick, but also for the entire family. In one account, a nurse found four out of seven in the family, including both parents, a baby, and two small children, ill:

 In a crib beside the mother’s bed was a six-week-old baby who had not been bathed for four days and was wet and cold. Though the father … running a temperature of 103 degrees, had to get out of bed … to care for his wife and children. … The family had no coal, and the three well children were shivering and hungry. The nurse gave care to the sick and bathed and fed the baby. She made a wood fire in the stove and prepared food for the other children. She then found a kind neighbor to continue to look after the children.…[15]

Euphemia Davis and Bessie B. Hawse, African American nurses, recalled similar situations during the influenza noting:

… a  family of ten were in bed and dying No one would come near. I was asked by the health officer if I would go. As I entered the little country cabin I found the mother dead in bed. Three children buried the week before. The father and remainder of the family running a temperature of 102–104. Some had influenza, others had pneumonia.… I rolled up my sleeves and began to cook,.. I milked the cow, gave medicine … I only thought of saving lives. I didn’t realize how tired I was until I got home.” [16]

There is an enormous number of family tragedies, millions of young victims of the pandemic, leaving orphans, bringing pain to elderly people and their dearest ones, who survived, left with suffering for life. Public funerals and even the opening of caskets were prohibited. Exceptions were made only for parents or wives identifying soldiers before burial – and even then, covered their mouths and noses with masks and refrained from touching the body.[7]

On July 1918 (1^st flu wave) at the Greek port town of Patras, a tobacco factory’s Director and a worker died 4 days after opening 5 boxes arrived from Thessaloniki, then war front, while most workers became ill by the flu. [17]

The 2^nd wave (autumn 1918) marked the beginning of mass deaths throughout the world. Reliable statistical data can rarely be found. It is possible to conclude from incomplete data, memories, newspaper articles and graves.[7]

The first cases of 1918 flu pandemic in the United States were reported from Fort Riley, Kansas on March when an Army private became ill; complaining of fever, sore throat, and headache. Military personnel were greatly impacted by the virus and many young recruits were dead from the flu before they ever saw combat. [18]

Dr. Otto Wernecke 39 , a dentist in  Wisconsin, father of 5 children  (having lost a 2–year–old daughter from scarlet fever in 1910) died from the flu epidemic in1918, leaving them in devastation and poverty.[19]

Dr James H. Wallace was on duty at Great Lakes Navy base in Chicago September 1918, when he was assigned to a ward of “flu” patients responsible for about 100 patients, most with violent broncho–pneumonia with no sulfa, no penicillin, not much but aspirin and death rate of over 100 a day. [19]

Carlandrea Didio, immigrated from Italy to the United States in 1889 with his young wife Louisa. He was one of the many victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic, at the age of 47. Left to mourn his death was his wife Louisa and three children, ages 13, 11 and 7. When Didio’s grandson   obtained a copy of his grandfather’s death certificate, he cried wondering how different his dads’ life would have been, if his father had lived. [19]

The Colorado eight Phye family members (parents, a daughter and five sons) were admitted to the emergency hospital having been set–up by the Red Cross in a banquet hall, as the general hospital was full, and between October 30 and November 9, 1918, all eight died from the flu. Charlie, age 45 (died Nov. 2); Jessie, age 40 (died Oct. 30); Florence, age 19 (died Nov. 1); Tommy, age 16 (died Nov. 7); Harry, age 10 (died Nov. 5); Bobbie, age 8 (died Nov. 4); Davie, age 6 (died Nov. 9); and Willie, age 4 (died Nov. 5). [19]

A polish couple, Joseph and Tekla with four kids, were living in Minneapolis, MN. In October 1918, Joseph contracted the flu, was seen by a doctor, was told to stay in bed. However being the breadwinner supporting his family with a new baby born a month before, he went back to work outside in a junkyard under cold and rainy weather, developed pneumonia and died 5 days later. His widow in such tough time with a family to support saw an advertisement in the newspaper and married a man whose first wife and a child died of the flu, and had three more children. [19]

Following the penetration of the Thessaloniki front, Dr Aleksandar Radosavljeviü noted a sudden disease among soldiers and disturbing French and Serbian medical corps units. A suspicion spread wide, that the enemy had poisoned the wells and the food while retreating, and that this was the cause of the disease. Only upon arrival in Raška, he found the local hospital full of diseased citizens and soldiers. Tiüa an active joyful lieutenant, born in Kraljevo, having arrived back from the front alive, glad to see his mother, died two days later.[20]

The Croatian paper Ozbor reported on October 19, 1918 that the state railway was forced, due to the illness of the employees, to reduce the number of train lines. Zagreb horse cab drivers refused to transport Zagreb doctors, for fear of the disease, which was the cause for the intervention of the municipal administration.  Ozbor“dated November 9, reported that entire houses were left empty in Bosnia.[21,22]

The hospital staff in just liberated Vranje consisted mainly of women doctors and medical nurses from Australia and New Zealand. These brave women represented the personnel of the third field surgical hospital, which was the only one which managed to follow the liberation army. Many Serbian soldiers from this region came home to tragic scenes, their dearest ones had died just a day or two before their return. Cries and laments were heard instead of laughter and joy. [23]

 As the pandemic second deadly autumn wave made its way through Greece, the mortality rates were extremely high. [24,25]

Konstantinos Faltaits  (1891-1921),  a 27-year-old author and  journalist in his unique 1919 book, written in Greek , describes with touching details the  disease hitting ‘like a thunderbolt’  his native Aegean Sea Greek island Skyros “with a ferocity akin only to the plagues of the Middle Ages’’. At night, people would fall asleep healthy but never woke in the morning. They came from the countryside to buy food, but died in the street. Angelos Kanas 8 years old, got sick, survived, but  his brother Anestis 12 died within 3 days. He narrated on camera about no space in the cemetery, the burials out of churches on hills on the edge of the village with the rain drifting the soil and bringing to light his brother’s body, an image not escaping from Angelos mind for nine decades. The island suffered   without medicines and hospitals, with 4 doctors, refusing to visit the sick and giving advice from the balcony- good food and wine – resulting in enriching the merchandise that ruthlessly raised the prices in the crisis. Skyros had a population of 3,200 at the time; two-thirds did not make it through the pandemic. Those who managed to survive ‘ the Biblical Cataclysm’, being enemies or hating each other ‘from generation to generation wanted to hug each other and everybody, who had lost many or even only a few of their parents, their children, their brothers and sisters, women, men were comforting each other’ .[26, 27,28,29,30]

Faltait’s unique report is similar to Hippocrates’s analysis of Perynthos influenza – like outbreak 2400 years ago.[31]

Similar family cases have been reported in the nearby Greek islands of Euboea and Andros. [32, 33, 34].

The  3^rd pandemic wave,  at the beginning of 1919,  took thousands of lives in  Australia,  not  however possible to talk about a 3^rd  wave in this case, as 2^nd wave was not present at all on this continent, due to the strict quarantines. [6]

The disease appeared sporadically also after the first half of 1919. The renowned Canadian doctor, Sir William Osler, (1849–1919) fell ill with the Spanish Flu on September 29, 1919, working at the Oxford University in England at that time. Following a short recovery, he got pneumonia, of which he died on December 29, 1919, despite long, intensive treatment.[ 6]

Many authors indicate 1920 instead of 1919, as the final year of the Flu pandemic. There is an indication of numerous death cases caused by influenza and its consequences in New York and Chicago at the beginning of 1920 [5] Many having recovered from the Spanish Flu, presented neurological and psychiatric complications. The American president Thomas Woodrow Wilson, (1856–1924), fell severely ill on April 3, 1919 in Paris during  signing of  peace treaty between the Allies and the defeated Central Powers. After his recovery he became forgetful, he concentrated with difficulty and his personality and conduct had somehow changed. This was manifested in his refraining from the political principles, he had advocated before his disease, insisting on the peace treaty being acceptable for both sides and if not, threatening the French prime minister, Georges Benjamin Clemenceau, (1841–1929) to abort negotiations. So he accepted easily the latter‘s requests, entailing extremely humiliating terms for the defeated Germany, to which he before flu strongly opposed. [6]