Category: Health & Wellbeing

During this Covid-19 pandemic, it has often been compared to the Influenza Pandemic of 1918/1919. We were wondering how it affected this area, so we delved into the records to try to figure it out.

Surprisingly, what we found was that there was no big spike in deaths locally at that time compared to the surrounding years (see the graph below **). So we though that maybe it didn’t affect the Millstreet area at all … but we were wrong.

When we looked at the case by case influenza and pneumonia figures (flu was often misdiagnosed as pneumonia) in the death registers, we saw that around March 1919, there was a big jump in numbers when about 20 died from flu and pneumonia. This coincided with what was referred to as the third wave of that pandemic in Ireland, and is easily seen by the yellow spike in the graph below. The smaller orange spike (November 1918) also coincided with the second wave of the pandemic in Ireland.

In total, we think about 30 people died locally died from it over the duration of that pandemic.

Some families here got destroyed by it … Twomeys of Islandhill lost 3 in a week, Sullivans of Umeraboy lost three in a month, Butlers of Liscahane lost two in a fortnight. The one very surprising thing  though is that most of the deaths were people that died locally were in their 20’s and 30’s, which we were unaware of but was a feature of that disease.

If that many died in the spring of 1919, then about 1,000 must have been infected locally at the time. That’s a lot of sick people.

Below we first look at the disease in Ireland, and also we break down the death registers to see those that died from it locally, when they got it, and where they were from: [read more …] “The Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919 – How it affected Millstreet”