What To Expect In An Australian Pandemic: Villages, Towns, Cities Quarantined...Churches, Schools, Workplaces Shut Down...Social Chaos...Food And Medical Shortages...Normal Life Ceases...100,000+ Australians Dead...Mobile Healthcheck Teams...Die In Your Homes
By Darryl Mason
Tony Abbott was Australia's Health Minister when Avian Flu threatened to become a global pandemic, in late 2005. The Howard Govt took the threat, and the advice of the World Health Organisation, seriously enough. They prepared. They had plans, and made them public. There was a Influenza Pandemic Worst Case Scenario and Tony Abbott was one of the ministers dispatched to the media to Get The Message Out.
Which he did. In some nighmarish late night TV interviews about "The Biological Tsunami", Tony Abbott stepped his way through the "inevitable" and very deadly influenza pandemic Australians would have to eventually face, and deal with.
If you thought he was rough as guts as Prime Minister, in 2005 Health Minister Tony Abbott was even more raw. He spilled on his knowledge from briefings on what The Worse Case Pandemic Scenario would look like in a kind of shocked awe. The scope of how daily life would be transformed in Australia during the "inevitable" influenza pandemic in the 21st century seemed to overload his mind.
"We don't know when a pandemic might happen, but if one does happen it will be a public health disaster, the magnitude of which this country has not seen at least since 1919 when we had the last flu pandemic."
Abbott expected a new, more virulent influenza pandemic in Australia to become a "Public Health Disaster" when he was Health Minister. He admitted to this, on TV. How prepared is the Morrison Govt today, in 2020, for a COVID-19 pandemic?
On 'Australia During A Pandemic', Tony Abbott in 2005 blurted a The Scenario the Americans had put together (presumably via the Centre for Disease Control) and on which he said he'd been thoroughly briefed:
"(in the scenario) medical facilities couldn't cope and there was widespread social breakdown, as people abandoned their posts concerned about their health.
"Now this is a pretty scary scenario, and just so people don't think it is entirely in the realm of science fiction - back in 1919, Australia had a Spanish flu pandemic outbreak and that killed some 13,000 Australians, in a then population of about 4 million and at different times in the first half of 1919, schools were closed, churches were closed, places of public gathering were off limits. Normal life had pretty much ceased in large parts of Australia. We have little folk memory of this though..."
The actual Australian death toll may have been closer to 25,000, by the time the virus seemed to have faded away in the early 1920s, as human immune systems adapted.
In 1919, when at least 15,000 Australians died from the virus, the annual death rate of the nation jumped by 25%.
In 1919, when at least 15,000 Australians died from the virus, the annual death rate of the nation jumped by 25%.
But Abbott was right about the rest. Most Australian families have no, or little generational memory, of 'The Great Influenza/Spanish Flu' Australian Pandemic 100 years ago. It was never up for much discussion around the dinner tables.
When 'The Great Influenza' reached Australia in 1919, schools, churches, concert halls, theatres, train stations, public squares, pubs, were all locked down. Farms, factories and city business districts ground to a halt as people fled to the country to escape the pandemic. They only succeeded in transporting the virus to rural Australia, where it killed as effortlessly as it had in heavily populated city centres.
What did "abandoning their posts" actually mean in 1919? It meant police, soldiers, firefighters, ambulance drivers, nurses, medical professionals eventually having to choose between caring for sick family members at home, or those in public care. Or leaving when they themselves became sick.
What did "abandoning their posts" actually mean in 1919? It meant police, soldiers, firefighters, ambulance drivers, nurses, medical professionals eventually having to choose between caring for sick family members at home, or those in public care. Or leaving when they themselves became sick.
Abbott raised this the 'abandonment of posts' in 2005 because the American Worst Case Scenario proposed the same would happen in the 21st Century, in the United States and Australia.
'The Great Influenza' or falsely named 'Spanish Flu', swept the globe from 1918 to early 1920. Quarantine systems in Australia did delay the arrival of a vast spread of the new virus for a few months.
More than 300 Australian soldiers who had somehow survived the European slaughter fields of World War I died from the influenza pandemic within weeks or months of finally making it home.
The extraordinary global death toll as more than one-third of the world's population became infected, killing some 80 million or more people, saw the loss of so many essential workers, doctors, hospital workers, nurses, police, public servants, teachers, production line workers, welders, craftspeople and children, the impacts rapidly transformed 20th century society in the West, and saw the surviving workers in the industrialised world become, suddenly, very valuable and not so disposable anymore. The politics of all Western countries were impacted by The Great Influenza, not only because of the death tolls, economic impacts, but because politicians, their advisers, their donors, died along with the rest of the people.
There was little warning before The Great Influenza exploded into reality. Unlike most flu epidemics in the 1800s, this one killed without discrimination. It laid waste to infants, old people, healthy young men.
Here's how The Times of London dealt with the rising panic about the spread of The Great Influenza in early 1919, shortly before the virus rapidly killed 200,000+ across the United Kingdom:
If you caught The Great Influenza H1N1 virus, death could come within a matter of days. Your lungs filled with fluid, as your immune system battled the invader and overdid the defences. Survivors described H1N1-affected lungs as 'like trying to breathe through wet sand.' There was no cure.
Back then, for the first year, they didn't even know what exactly was killing millions of people. Was it a virus? Many experts thought it was a bacterium. A conspiracy theory raged in the the Allied nations of World War I that the Germans had invented a biological bomb in revenge for losing 'The Great War'.
There was little warning before The Great Influenza exploded into reality. Unlike most flu epidemics in the 1800s, this one killed without discrimination. It laid waste to infants, old people, healthy young men.
Here's how The Times of London dealt with the rising panic about the spread of The Great Influenza in early 1919, shortly before the virus rapidly killed 200,000+ across the United Kingdom:
If you caught The Great Influenza H1N1 virus, death could come within a matter of days. Your lungs filled with fluid, as your immune system battled the invader and overdid the defences. Survivors described H1N1-affected lungs as 'like trying to breathe through wet sand.' There was no cure.
Back then, for the first year, they didn't even know what exactly was killing millions of people. Was it a virus? Many experts thought it was a bacterium. A conspiracy theory raged in the the Allied nations of World War I that the Germans had invented a biological bomb in revenge for losing 'The Great War'.
In 1919-1920, doctors, hospitals, morgues and graveyards were overwhelmed by the endless casualties. In the US city of Philadelphia, 5000 people died in one week. Mass rioting broke out, whole streets full of cramped dwellings were torched and corpses were piled in mounds a dozen bodies high. They were tossed into carts and transported to mass burial sites. This was the United States in the age of cinema and radio.
In some European cities, entire towns were burned to the ground, with the dying still in their homes, to try and contain the spread of the virulent flu. Ships at sea were blocked from entering ports and became "floating caskets." Other ships were torched in harbours before passengers could get to land.
'The Great Influenza' is believed now to have originated in animals (chickens and/or pigs) but mutated quickly and crossed over into humans. A Kansas farm next to a military base is now often cited as The Great Influenza's Ground Zero.
The influenza virus mutating, plus a lack of capable medical facilities, unsanitary hospitals, towns and cities, a shortage of doctors and nurses, also helped the 1918-19 death toll to move into the tens of millions, globally.
And yet, there are few countries in the world today that can honestly claim to have a universal public health system that could cope with a full-blown influenza pandemic, like COVID-19. There aren't enough hospital beds, or isolation wards.
In Australia in 1918-1920, after hospitals were overwhelmed, as was common around the world, the infected were quarantined in their homes and left to live or die. You were either going to make it, or not.
In Australia in 1918-1920, after hospitals were overwhelmed, as was common around the world, the infected were quarantined in their homes and left to live or die. You were either going to make it, or not.
The way govts of 2020 will cope with a COVID-19 Pandemic are not so distant from 100 years ago. As we've already seen in China, Japan, Korea and Iran, the United States and Italy, and other countries, by mid-February, 2020. Home quarantines and 1000s isolated in 'Medical Care Camps' outside of major cities has quickly became normal, as they did in 1919. And now, as back then, deaths outside of hospitals or medical facilities are forgotten, missed or ignored, left off the official numbers.
In one late night, chilling interview, in 2005, Health Minister Tony Abbott revealed the federal govt expected and feared a 'beyond normal' flu pandemic could kill more than 100,000 Australians:
"A pandemic if it hits Australia and it is of the severity of the 1918 outbreak, will potentially kill many thousands of people and it's hard to imagine any terrorist attack - short of a nuclear bomb in a major city - that would have a comparable impact.
"Back in the time of the Spanish flu there was much less international travel, people coming to Australia had to arrive by ship. Thanks to the then Commonwealth quarantine authorities we were quite effectively protected for many months. Certainly New Zealand, which put a much less stringent system of quarantine in place, was impacted very early and had about double the death rate of the flu outbreak in Australia, which is why in New Zealand they have a stronger folk memory of this than we do.
"We have plans for an escalating health response, including mobile teams, home quarantine, home treatment, so that only the very serious cases have to go to public hospitals. We would certainly be alerting people to the potential dangers of doing certain sorts of things. Whether we needed to close down public institutions would depend upon the virulence of the virus and who was most susceptible to it."
In 2020, it's become a bit more obvious the limits to which the spread of a highly contagious new influenza virus can be contained, by any method, particularly when it can hide away inside a new human host for up to a month, rendering the host infectious before symptoms begin to show, like the COVID-19 strain is now believed to do. And this is all before the new virus has undergone any dramatic mutation. 'The Great Influenza' began its killing spree in 1918. The vast majority of deaths came in 1919, after the H1N1 virus had mutated.
If it feels like some govts are already in a 'Hey Man, Flu's Gonna Do What The Flu's Gotta Do' headspace, that may not be far wrong.
Maybe the biggest cities in the US, Europe, Australia, the UK are planning to shut down for a month or two or more, and are prepared to take a massive economic hit, like China has. Maybe the 2020 Olympics will be cancelled.
Or maybe these govts won't do that. Maybe they won't inflict extended mass disruption on their people and their economies.
Maybe our Western govts already at 'Flu's Gonna Do What Flu's Gotta Do.' because some of their experts and advisers are telling them that even shutting down cities is an an action that will, ultimately, have only a limited effect on stopping the new influenza strain eventually reaching most people on the planet.
Maybe our Western govts already at 'Flu's Gonna Do What Flu's Gotta Do.' because some of their experts and advisers are telling them that even shutting down cities is an an action that will, ultimately, have only a limited effect on stopping the new influenza strain eventually reaching most people on the planet.
As the COVID-19 influenza virus clearly intends to do.
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Tony Abbott interview quotes, September, 2005:
