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INFLUENZA
go, this year’s flu season came in fast and
furious. In some parts of the country, GPs
and emergency departments started seeing
patients with flu or flu-like symptoms in late
March and early April, about two months
earlier than in most winters. May saw a
steep increase. June, said Canterbury District
Health Board (CDHB) chief executive David
Meates, was “a June like no other”.
By then, more than half of all flu-like
illnesses tested by GPs and hospitals were
found to be influenza-positive. According to
the Institute of Environmental Science and
Research, it was one of the highest positivityThe flu struck rich and poor,
famous and obscure. From left,
Pablo Picasso, Kaiser Wilhelm II,
DH Lawrence, Groucho Marx,
TS Eliot, Mahatma Gandhi and
Amelia Earhart all contracted
the disease, but recovered.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s
first son, TE Lawrence’s
father and US President
Donald Trump’s
grandfather all died
in the pandemic.has found that influenza is probably New
Zealand’s deadliest infectious disease. More
than 200,000 New Zealanders contract the
flu each year. Of these, it’s estimated that
400-500 people will die either directly or
indirectly from its effects. In the key 65-79-
year age group, men are twice as likely to
die from the flu as women, and Māori are
3.6 times more likely to die than those of
other ethnicities. Those living in the most
deprived 20% of neighbourhoods are 1.8
times as likely to die compared with those
living in the wealthiest areas.
With still another month or two toThe great pandemic
I
n November 1918, Maurice
O’Callaghan, a St John ambulance
man, attended a call-out to a home
in the central Auckland suburb of Grey
Lynn. Inside, he found a man lying in
bed. He’d been dead for three days.
O’Callaghan would tell a government
commission the next year that the
man’s wife was lying in the same bed,
“not dead but driven out of her mind
by the fact that she was lying in bed
with a dead husband and could not get
up”. The man in the Grey Lynn house
was one of the early victims of the
Spanish flu, a vicious pandemic that
would kill thousands of New Zealand-
ers and tens of millions worldwide,
beginning just as World War I was
drawing to an end.
Anthony Burgess describes in his
autobiography how his father came
home to Manchester on military
furlough in 1919 to find the novelist’s
mother and sister dead in bed from
the flu, while the young Anthony laychuckling in his cot in the same room.
This was proof, Burgess said, of a god:
“Only a supreme being could con-
trive so brilliant an afterpiece to four
years of unprecedented suffering and
devastation.”
Viennese painter Egon Schiele wrote
to his mother in October 1918 that his
pregnant wife, Edith, had the flu, which
developed into pneumonia. “The illness
is exceptionally severe and critical; I am
preparing myself for the worst.” She
and their unborn child died on October
28 and he died three days later.
The 1918-19 Spanish flu killed about
9000 here, including an estimated 2500
Māori, almost 5% of that population.
It remains, says retired history pro-
fessor Geoffrey Rice, “New Zealand’s
worst natural disaster, both in terms of
mortality and the extent of disruption
to everyday life. No event has killed
so many New Zealanders in so short a
space of time.”The influenza virus can never be taken
lightly, as history has proven.
rates for this period in recent years.
In just one week, the CDHB saw a doubling
of diagnosed influenza cases, from 74 to- Over the month of June, 908 bed days
were due to influenza and bed occupancy
rates were “off the charts”. By the end of
the month, the number of flu cases was the
highest the Canterbury health system had
seen since 2009. There were 648 influenza-
related hospitalisations. Of these, says CDHB
medical officer of health Ramon Pink, 11
people, all with pre-existing conditions, had
died of flu-related complications.
The same month, in the Nelson-
Marlborough region, hospital wards were
running at 105% to 110% occupancy.
Schools were reporting a third of their
students absent with flu. As in Canterbury,
things have calmed down, says Nelson
Marlborough DHB chief medical officer
Nick Baker, “but it has been a bad season.
Last season (2018) was late and light – we
watched flu and spring racing against each
other. The season change won in the end,
but influenza lingered over the summer
months in ways that were not typical. So,
as soon as we went back into winter, it
was ready to strike. A lot of our vulnerable
people who weren’t immunised went down
with it.”
In one week in June, the number of
Aucklanders going to the doctor with flu-
like symptoms was 171 per 100,000 people,
nearly four times the national average for
the same week in previous years. On June 2,Only an estimated one in
23 deaths caused directlyor indirectly by the flu
virus are recognised
and recorded on deathcertificates.