I am reading the book listed below and I thought this page placed in start relief, our present situation.
Influenza Pandemic and Post-War Malaise '
Beginning in January, 1919, the Spanish Influenza pandemic reached Australia, killing 12,000 Australians and millions world-wide. Churches, schools and meetings were closed, and the Anzac Day marches planned for April 1919 were cancelled. Strict quarantine regulations delayed the landing of troopships and each State closed its borders in an attempt to isolate the little understood disease.12 In North Hobart, a run-down section of the Tasmanian capital, victims died in large numbers. In September 1919, local churches formed an Emergency Clothing Committee that set out to discover the extent of hardship created by the epidemic. Hobart was divided into thirteen districts, each of which was supervised by a clergyman. The Rev. E. Herbert Hobday, pastor of the Baptist Tabernacle, was in charge of North Hobart. Through visitation he discovered that almost every family in North Hobart had lost at least one member to the flu and that housing conditions were deplorable. He organised his church for action, appointing Ruby Livingstone as a full-time Sister' to work with the needy. The women and young men of the church then helped to establish the Ware Street Mission as a permanent church outpost to help the poor of North Hobart. This included both personal evangelism and advocacy of public programs to correct the conditions that bred disease.13 Even more enduring than the impact of the flu pandemic was that of the returned men on the Australian community in the 1920s. Australian historian Patsy Adam-Smith recalled her own childhood memories of the sights and smells of the maimed:
We lived in a world where men were called 'Hoppy', 'Wingy', 'Shifty', 'Gunner', 'Stumpy', 'Deafy', 'Hooky', according to whether they lost a leg, an arm (or part of one), an eye, their hearing, or had a disfigured face drawn by rough surgery into a leer ... And we listened through the thin walls when our parents came home from visiting a 'returned' uncle in hospital: 'I can't stand it. I can't go again.' It is mother. Your father's voice comes, strangled, like hers, 'You'll be alright.' 'No, but the smell. When he coughs ... and breathes out... it's ... oh, I'm going to be sick.' But she goes back next Sunday and the next until the day you go to school with a black rosette on your lapel, and the flag is flying half-mast for your Uncle Dick who was gassed.14
For some time after the war there was a shortage of ministerial candidates in the evangelical churches. This was especially true of the Methodists who gave so many of their sons to the war. Many had not returned, and a number of those who did return no longer desired to enter the ministry. Men who had been too young to serve felt the war's impact and they too were lost to the ministry. In the case of the NSW Methodists, only four candidates for the ministry presented themselves for training in 1921, and that number did This same psychological and emotional damage manifested itself in almost all returned men, including the most stable and devoutly Christian among them.
From “Attending to the National Soul” Piggin and Lidner 2020 Monash University Press. (I edited out the list of references for brevity on the net)
Remember no modern heath care, no vaccines, no payouts to ease the burden, no modern housing. 400,000 went to WWi, 60,000 died, 230,000 of those who returned were maimed and injured maimed and injured, only to face this pandemic. Only answer Lockdowns, and minimise the spread as much as possible.
Think carefully on what we perceive as disadvantage.
Jim