by
Les May
EVERY
year
we have a ‘flu
season’.
It runs from week 40 of one year to week 20 of the next. There are
two peaks, one before Christmas and the other after. Sometimes these
are caused by different influenza ‘types’.
People like me toddle off to the medical centre and get a ‘jab’
each October which
gives us short term immunity to the strains circulating in the world
that year.
It’s
all well understood. Some years it is worse than other, but by and
large the system works.
- But it only works so long as the influenza virus behaves itself reasonably well. It didn’t in mid 1917 or early 1918. Somewhere in the middle of America a new, more virulent strain emerged which was more deadly to the youngish than the old. It spread through the training camps preparing young American men to fight in the Great War. Woodrow Wilson despatched 300,000 of them to Europe in crowded troop ships. The rest, as they say, is ‘history’.
No
one could foresee the emergence of Covid19, so the need for massive
quantities of PPE and the death traps that care homes became could
not be foreseen either. Or so the story goes.
But
what we do know is that every so often the influenza virus ceases to
behave in manner we have found a way of dealing with. When it will
do this cannot be predicted, but that at some time it will is a
certainty. It is, in that famous phrase, ‘a known unknown’.
We know it will happen, but we don’t know when. In the past
century this has happened four times; Spanish flu 1918-20,
Asian flu 1957-58, Hong Kong flu 1968-69, Swine
flu 2009-10.
Had
the virus which emerged in China last year been a new and more
virulent form of our old enemy, the influenza virus, something akin
to the 1918 form, Johnson and the Tories would have been equally deep
in the ‘do-do’, because they still would not have had enough PPE.
The
fact that the virus causing Covid19 is ‘new’ has allowed
the government to shield itself from the more serious criticism that
it had become complacent about the possibility of having to deal with
an influenza pandemic, not just ‘seasonal flu’. It is not
only the government which has become complacent, we, the public, have
as well.
Every
year we have reminders of the slaughter in the Great War, we have
memorials to those killed and many of us will remember the names of
relatives who were amongst them. The people who might have known the
names of relatives who died of Spanish flu themselves died in the
1980s and 90s, so it has never embedded itself in the public
consciousness.
Influenza
usually has a mortality rate in the region of 1 to 2 people in a
thousand which is probably slightly less than that of Covid19.
Spanish flu had a mortality rate estimated as high as 1-200 per
thousand people infected in some areas. Even at low mortality rates
if enough people become infected the number of deaths will be large;
so far more than 300,000 people are thought to have died from
Covid19. Spanish flu killed some 50 million people.
Equally
important is the social disruption a flu pandemic will cause. The
means by which the person to person transmission can be reduced are
identical to those which have been applied to combat the spread of
Covid19, social distancing, good hand/nose/mouth hygiene school
closures, work from home etc.
Politicians
who are capable of thinking strategically would recognise that a flu
variant equal in killing power to that which caused the 1918-20
pandemic could arise at any time and would have in
place strategies for coping with it. On this basis the Johnson
government, and perhaps the people advising it on public health
matters, have failed miserably, but would any recent government have
done any better? Once you are in thrall to market forces you buy
where things are cheapest.
Such
strategies would include not just larger stocks of PPE, but would
include support for a national garment sector making such PPE which
could increase production rapidly in case of need, ditto
manufacturers of face masks, ventilators, anti-viral drugs, realistic
assessment of the capacity of care homes and similar facilities to
isolate sick residents, etc. Had these already been in place because
someone had recognised the possibility of a new and more virulent
form of influenza arising, the number of deaths from Covid19 would
probably have been lower.
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