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Why did so many kiwis die?
Without the marvels of modern medicine, people who caught the flu were in for the fight of their lives. Spanish Flu was deadly and unlike today, there were few ways to help the severely affected.
In the space of two months, New Zealand lost 9,000 people to Spanish Flu – over half the number of all kiwi soldiers lost during the four years of World War One.
No medicine, no medics, no plan | Intensive care and mechanical ventilators did not exist in 1918. No coordinated pandemic plan existed either. Some countries and cities promoted mask wearing, frequent handwashing, quarantining and isolating sick people. Studies later showed that the places with tighter public health measures had less cases and fewer fatalities. In Australia, which had the lowest death rate from Spanish Flu in the world, mask-wearing in Sydney and Melbourne was mandatory in public places, even for children. This was not the case in Aotearoa where infection control measures were late to be introduced and disorganised.
Flu kills the young and healthy
Surprisingly, many of those who died from the Spanish Flu were young adults between the ages of 20 and 45; possibly because many of them had been exposed to an earlier “Russian Flu” in the 1890s. Rather than helping them overcome Spanish Flu, this earlier influenza infection caused their immune systems to overreact, creating a cytokine storm that resulted in organ failure and death. While Spanish Flu began mildly with aches and pains, within a few hours some people turned purplish black due to a lack of oxygen. Without antibiotics, bacterial pneumonia proved fatal. Patients drowned in the fluids of their own lungs and nothing could be done for them.
Horrific scenes reported
Spanish Flu in Aotearoa caused hundreds of deaths per week. This caused tragic and chaotic scenes across the country. Coffins lined the footpaths outside churches, bodies were laid out in parks, and cart loads of corpses were transported by train for burial at cemeteries like Waikumete in West Auckand. Outside of cities, Māori evacuated whole villages, leaving the sick behind and burying whānau in mass graves without tangi.
Rates of death were terrible for returned servicemen living in barracks at Wellington’s military camps. But they were even worse for rural Māori.
Māori suffered most from Spanish Flu
Most Māori lived outside Aotearoa’s major cities in 1918. Because of this, they had been less exposed to respiratory illnesses than urban Pākehā. Many Māori missed the milder first wave of the influenza virus which had spread months earlier and which might have given them some immunity. Access to already scarce medical care due to a critical shortage of doctors and nurses because of World War One, was even worse in rural communities.
There are big gaps in records of Māori deaths from Spanish Flu, but historians believe the death rate for Māori was significantly higher than for Pākehā. Almost five percent of all Māori are thought to have died during the 1918 influenza pandemic at a rate of 50 people per 1000. The death rate for Pākehā was 5.8 per 1000, making Māori eight times more likely than Europeans to die from Spanish Flu.
In 1918, returned serviceman Aperatama Rupene wrote of the “influenza plague ravaging the Māori settlements”.
“Without doctors or nurses the Māoris have had to rely upon their own knowledge of herbs and remedies to cope with the dread scourge. I have to complain that the health authorities have not shown sufficient foresight in the matter of the Maoris: nor indeed are they making proper preparations for future fights.” (Auckland Star, 20 December 1918).
In some Māori hapū, a quarter of the community died. Others left their villages and their sick behind them, relocating to escape the disease. Many Māori felt abandoned by the authorities.
