The epidemic broke upon us with alarming suddenness. In the first days of October when the beautiful African spring had come with greater warmth and serenity than usual, there were a few whisperings that influenza had made its appearance; but few paid any heed, for we were engrossed in preparations for "Our Day." On Saturday the 5th Capetown was fuller than usual. People had come in from the country to shop in preparation for the Monday's holiday, Wiener's Day. This is our spring festival - a day for picnics along the shores of False Bay or on the veld where the spring flowers are in their full beauty. The coloured folk, the Indians and the chief concern of the moment was whether the fine weather would last.
Monday morning broke chill and damp and when one opened the morning paper is was to learn that a special meeting of the Town Council had been summoned to deal with a state of affairs in the slum quarter that called for immediate action. Almost at the same hour the Mayoress (Mrs W Thorne) had called a meeting of women to set soup kitchens going and to help in the care of the sick, for an indescribable misery reigned among the coloured population. The dead were being picked up in the streets; in one house a dead man was discovered surrounded by his helpless children: a woman awoke to find a corpse at her side. In many a poor home the living and the dead were huddled in one room, and among the stricken there was none to call in the help of a neighbour.
Action was imperative, and before the day was over soup and medicine were being carried round. The women's societies rallied round the Mayoress, and a Committee of the Town Council sat in continual session to meet the ever-growing peril. Money was voted for food, milk and medicine, and for the moment alarm was banished by bustling activity and an eager wish to help, and in drenching rain and bitter wind the workers went forward in their errands of mercy.
The next day business was practically at a standstill, factories were closed, and it was only, as an afterthought that we discussed the good news from the front.
The physicians, the majority of whom are on active service, could not get round to all their patients and gave directions through the press. The bacteriologists had no serum to order. The few remaining nurses were worked to death, and many fell victims to the malady. Those able to work were driven from house to house giving skilled aid, and leaving the rest to other hands. Women in childbirth could get no assistance, and along the highways one met processions of hearses and waggon-loads of coffins hastily put together. Temporary morgues were instituted, and often the dead were carried to their graves wrapped in blankets. Indeed, in the back streets, where death had been busiest, the bodies were hurriedly piled one upon another on a waggon and carried away with all speed, for here in the south swift burial is imperative.
5,000 Deaths in a Fortnight.
Five thousand deaths within a fortnight is the estimate, and it is acknowledged to be low, for it is difficult to obtain figures from the Malays and Indians.
Things are improving now (October 15) - especially among the native and coloured population - thanks to care and good food, but as one walks along the thoroughfares one sees languid forms and grey faces and on every hand one hears the loose, distressful cough which is the legacy of the disease.
As the disease declined among the coloured people, it increased among the Europeans, and the death-rate was highest among youth. Those from 18 to 30, especially young men have succumbed the most readily. Death is due chiefly to pneumonia, which almost invariably follows the attack of influenza, and even now, when we are told that things are mending, graves are being dug daily to the number of 300 in anticipation, and for this work the Government has granted the labour of the Nigerian troops passing through. In Kimberley and Johannesburg the epidemic rages, and from every town and dorp comes the cry for doctors, nurses, and supplies of medicine and serum.
Medical opinion says that in some cases the disease bears a close resemblance to pneumonic plague, and the question is asked why Spanish influenza should have attacked us here in so much more violent a form than elsewhere. The answer seems to be that the native, and especially the half-caste population, is peculiarly liable to lung trouble of all kinds. A large percentage of the coloured population of the Cape is consumptive, and we live in a climate where tropic heat alternates at some seasons with icy winds. Moreover, the native and the coloured man make little fight for life when they are attacked by illness. The Indian and the Malay meet disease with a fatalism that is not without dignity, but it is left to the European to fight disease and dirt with science and Western energy, and he has to meet the inertia and ignorance of the brown races.
The blame for what has occurred is ascribed to the authorities that let loose the infected passengers of the Jaroslav which came to this port from Sierra Leone, and so far the defence put forward by them is weak. Now, when the mischief is at work from one end of Union to the other, influenza has been declared a disease to be quarantined - a notable instance of belated wisdom.
