By late afternoon yesterday at the Tower Hamlets Tamiflu collection point, the steady stream had begun to falter a little, but still they came, clutching their green and white prescriptions.
For 11 and a half hours a day, seven days a week, this small, unassuming medical building in a Victorian terraced street has come to operate as the frontline in the national battle against swine flu, the central distribution point for medication in the borough, which has seen the highest concentration of reported cases in the country.
London, along with the West Midlands, has been one of the worst affected areas for the illness for some weeks; figures released this week showed the east end borough is the hottest of the hotspots, with 1,360 people recorded with flu-like symptoms last week alone, a situation described by the chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, as "extraordinary". Some days, GPs in the borough get as many as 400 calls a day.
But if business is undeniably brisk at the clinic, and many of those who come have genuine and deep-seated concerns about the illness, the overwhelming impression of this clinic is not that of a fevered battlefield. Were it not for the hastily laminated signs, affixed liberally to the outside of the building, reading "Anti-viral centre", this could be any building in a suburban industrial estate.
Andrew Brown, a nurse who normally works as a clinical educator elsewhere in the primary care trust, is co-ordinating the volunteer effort to staff the clinic. There are no medics here, just administrators, nurses and education experts. "It has been very busy, yes, we have constant footfall through the clinic," says Brown, "but we were prepared for this. We always said a pandemic was not a matter of if, but when. We are learning every day, to make sure we are even better prepared next time."
Most of those turning up, walking briskly into the clinic, are the "flu friends" of neighbours or family members who have been diagnosed by their doctors, and who have come to collect tablets on their behalf.
A few, though, identified by their slower, less steady gait, turn up each day showing symptoms of the disease, against medical advice. The two are directed into separate waiting rooms, blue for the healthy, yellow for the unwell, and those displaying flu symptoms will be asked to wear a mask as they interact with others.
David, from Wapping and in his 50s, is here on behalf of his wife. She is not yet unwell, he says, but having had a lung transplant three years ago is deemed to be vulnerable; their five-year-old granddaughter's diagnosis with the illness this week prompted his wife to call her doctor, who issued a Tamiflu prescription. Brown insists that while Tower Hamlet's density of housing, young demographic and high levels of deprivation will have played their part in contributing to the high levels of disease reported here, equally key is the fact that the borough was well prepared to record suspected cases that might still be unreported elsewhere.
"People have talked about the Blitz spirit here," says Brown. "It's typical of the NHS, when the chips are down, people are getting in there and helping out."
