When we scroll past the various articles, snippets and news on the internet it all begins with a curiosity for something new but its endgame always gets the dimension of either a vile hatred or an inexplicable rhetoric. Hundred and two years ago, the world was a different place. People did not have smart phones in their hands 24×7 streaming them news from around the world. The only access to news was through paper printed dailies. That was the time when the world was witnessing the end of the First World War or the Great War, as it was known back then.

The end of the greatest war the mankind had faced up till that time was going to get complicated. It was in Fort Riley, Kansas USA, in the year 1918, when Private Albert Gitchell reported illness in the hospital on March 4th morning. Later that noon many of his fellow soldiers were reporting similar symptoms. This was the beginning of the infamous Spanish flu which travelled to Europe when the USA soldiers went to European theatre to help France. The flu was caused by an H1N1 influenza type A virus and gradually went on to become a far deadlier force in terms of number of lives it claimed than the slowly ending World War-I.

Lethality of this early twentieth century pandemic in combination with the origin of its name presents an interesting case. One of the neutral countries in the First World War was Spain. Majority of belligerent countries in the WWI had heavily censored its media for the sake of keeping the information flow limited. Spain had kept its media out of any censorship. This resulted in Spanish media reporting the news related to the viral pandemic in all its macabre details. Residents of other countries which were under blacked out media could only rely on the information coming out of Spain. Hence, majority of people assumed that Spain was the origin of the flu. This gave the pandemic a misplaced etymology. It was observed that the middle aged people had a better chance of surviving the flu with the too young and the too old consisting of majority of causalities in the pandemic.

That flu forced the theaters, schools and other public places to shut down much like what has been the case during the current Covid19 pandemic. It had a hugely variable time of residence in the infected people. In some cases, it was just staying in the system for two to three days. In others, it went on to become a harsh form of pneumonia. It was given various names like La Grippe Espagnole and La Pesadilla which was adopted from the name of the famous 1781 oil painting of Anglo-Swiss painter Henry Fuseii- the Nightmare. A town in north France, Etaples had English troops based in it. It also had numerous hospital camps. Overcrowding in the hospitals of the town became one of the reasons for the spread of the flu. Occasionally the media in Europe started referring to the flu as the French Flu. But the innumerable references to the country of Spain in the media became the determining factor in it being globally known as Spanish Flu.

Backdrop of the Etaples town becomes important as research over subsequent decades have shown a strong indication that the pandemic might have had its beginning in this town. Research suggests that the pandemic might have originated in a British military base situated in Etaples. It becomes a possible place of origin of the pandemic as it was near marshes which are connected with seas with frequent visits by migratory birds. We can relate to this in the current context with the wet market theory of Covid19 which suggests the jump of the coronavirus from bats to pangolin to humans in Wuhan with markets selling Pangolin based foodstuffs. The military base in Etaples also had numerous farms nearby with geese, duck and pigs which used to serve as food for the soldiers. There were numerous horses too for transportation purposes. It also had assortment of around 24 kinds of war gases. Some of the gases are known to be mutagenic. This body of information provides a possible explanation of outbreak of the epidemic around time from December 1916 to March 1917. The Spanish flu infection had a characteristic known as heliotrope cyanosis, a bluish coloration of the skin. The flu had a mortality rate of 40% among the sick.

The flu had another prominent outbreak in the English town of Aldershot. This pandemic with a misplaced naming of Spanish Flu was accompanied by strong to severe pneumonia and occasionally with Purulent Bronchitis. This category of bronchitis was characterized by development of pus in the lungs. The flu and its associated complications was getting all the more complicated as there were other chemical threats to the soldiers and people with use of war gases like Phosgene and Chlorine, and other stress factors like overcrowding especially in the infamous trenches.

In the case of the Spanish Flu, it is important to note that the pandemic came back in a second wave and that the second wave had caused more fatalities. This was because the people were not treating the issued instructions of safety in regards to public health, seriously. The Spanish flu virus never actually vanished. The people at large developed collective immunity towards it. This means that the herd immunity reached a certain threshold which then prevented the disease from attaining ravaging virulent proportions in a third wave. This gives us a lesson in the current context for the world in the time of Covid19. Every virus has a basic reproduction number (BRN) denoted by R0. It denotes how many persons can get infected in the vicinity of one infected person. The lesser the R0 is, the sooner population can get herd immunity. This is a type of immunity where a group as a whole is resistant to a pathogen. If a certain threshold number of people have got infected then the virus faces antibodies in people where it might reach a second or third time. This results in a higher probability of neutralizing of the pathogen before it can infect someone who has never contracted it. This is how herd immunity helps in protection of the entire group. Given the fact that SARS Cov-2 virus has a BRN in between 2 and 3, we can have a certain amount of hope for herd immunity but not too much. Until a vaccine is developed and is available at large, it would be wise and prudent to follow the instructions being given by the health authorities. Otherwise, we too could face a deadlier second wave of Covid19 like the world faced for the 1918 flu.