Fergus Finlay: We should prepare for a double whammy of flu and Covid-19

We’re going to have a flu season soon ... it’s going to live alongside the continuing pandemic of Covid-19, writes Fergus Finaly

The flu jab will provide a high degree of protection for you and those around you for the rest of the winter. Picture: iStock

My grandfather is buried in the Hague. On his gravestone it says “We mourn our loved one but do not murmur dearest”.

He was 39 when he died, a Sergeant of the 1st battalion of the Welsh Fusiliers. He died four days after the end of the First World War. It would take me a long time to explain the impact of his death on my family history — but you can take it from me that that impact was profound, in all sorts of ways.

But here’s the little I know about him. He was born William Owen Roberts in Wales. He must have been a tough enough guy. He fought for the Allies in one of the cruellest battles of the First World War, and survived. The battle of Ypres, fought in Belgium (there were actually five battles fought in the same area), was the first time in the history of warfare that one side (the Germans) used poison gas on the other. The battles, which lasted years and achieved little, took hundreds of thousands of lives.

But as I said, my grandfather survived. And then he was captured, and made a prisoner of war (PoW). And he remained a prisoner until the war ended.

Forced labour, hunger to the point of malnutrition, dirty and insanitary conditions, and frequently brutal treatment — that’s what PoWs endured in that war. Thousands died of typhus. However, thousands of prisoners were also sent to work on farms and in forests, wherever cheap labour was needed. In those circumstances, while working and living conditions were hard, the chances of survival were higher.

I don’t know which kind of PoW William Roberts was. But he survived that too. Then, at 11am on November 11, 1918, the First World War was declared over. And having survived it all, he was sent home.

He died four days later, in a train. He died without ever seeing his wife again, and without ever seeing his only child, my mother. I don’t know if he had ever even seen a picture of her.

He died of the flu.

The Spanish flu it was called then. It was the wrong name — it was actually diagnosed and took its first casualties in America, and spread from there to the rest of the world. A more accurate name would be the American flu, though that’s not a name that would commend itself to the racist who is president of America.

Soldiers from Fort Riley, Kansas, ill with Spanish flu at a hospital ward at Camp Funston. Picture: National Museum of Health and Medicine

That flu came in two waves. The second was far worse than the first, and cut down millions of people in their prime. Second waves of any pandemic tend to be worse than the first. Second waves can have a mutated virus, but mostly they attack people who have let their guard down.

There was no vaccine for the flu then, of course. And there was precious little treatment. In fact the treatment sometimes made the condition worse — dozens of people, terrified, struggling to breathe, unable to stand, packed into overcrowded wards and hospitals, lying sometimes on trolleys in corridors, with staff struggling to keep temperatures down, until in too many cases they succumbed themselves.

We’re going to have a flu season soon. Here in Ireland. It’s going to live alongside the continuing pandemic of Covid-19. If we don’t prevent it, it will, once again, overwhelm our health system.

And it’s possible, just possible, that the first wave of the next flu might well sit cheek by jowl, not with the coronavirus we know, but with a second wave.

We don’t know that for sure. It seems that most of us are doing the things we need to do — keeping our distance, wearing our masks, looking out for each other. But it also seems as if a lot of us believe that the worst is over. It’s only young people getting it now, and sure they can cope, can’t they? And the virus is weakening, anyway. So let’s get back to normal, in crowded sweaty pubs and nightclubs. Stop trying to prevent us from enjoying the Irish birthright of pints and craic.

Is it weakening? I’d love to think so. But hospital admissions — and even worse, admissions to intensive care — are starting to climb again across Europe, and pretty rapidly. When you see admissions to ICU going up, you will see the number of people dying starting to rise about a fortnight later.

It hasn’t happened here. Not yet. Hospital admissions aren’t on the increase here. So far. Admissions to ICU are relatively stable. Up to this point.

Despite mistakes, we’ve done a good job in Ireland, and we’ve saved lives in the process. Right now, we’re trying to get kids back to school safely, and that seems to be working reasonably well.

When you see admissions to ICU going up, you will see the number of people dying starting to rise about a fortnight later, writes our columnist. Picture: Neil Hall/PA

There’s all sorts of reasons for that, but one main one. We’ve gotten better at looking out for each other. The wearing of a mask, and keeping our distance from each other, and washing our hands constantly — they’re all becoming second nature to an awful lot of us.

But underlying that is another relevant fact. Our health system is still in a fragile condition. In the best of all worlds, it will take several more years of investment and reorganisation before it’s the health system we deserve.

It ain’t there yet. And it simply could not cope with a renewed outbreak of the coronavirus, especially alongside a major outbreak of the flu. We’re heading into the time of year when the risk of that combined catastrophe is highest. And if it happens, hundreds if not thousands of our loved ones will struggle, and some will die. And they may die lonely and alone if we are dealing with two separate pandemics.

So, can I ask you a favour? Please? Go down to your local chemist now, and ask them to register you for the flu jab (you can do it online with some of the multiples). That way you’ll be notified as soon as it’s available, sometime in the next couple of weeks. And for a lot of people (though not everyone) it’s free. It will take 10 minutes out of your day, and will provide a high degree of protection for you, your children, and the elderly people you love, for the rest of the winter.

You know what they write on every memorial to the soldiers who died in “the war to end all wars”. Lest we forget. Well, here’s the thing we can’t forget. The world couldn’t stop a pandemic back then. It couldn’t treat, it couldn’t help. It sent a generation of young people to die in battle, and then watched helplessly as millions more died when the battle was over.

Now, as we face one pandemic, with the risk of a second one around the corner, we know better. We haven’t a cure for the coronavirus yet, but we can stop it at the gate. And we can prevent the flu virus from attacking us at the same time. 

All we have to do is to double down on what we have been doing, just looking out for each other. And, for our own sake and our kids, get the flu jab.