José Ameal Peña was four years old when the 1918 flu tore through his small fishing town in northern Spain, its deadly path narrated by the daily ringing of church bells.
More than a century later, Ameal Peña – believed to be Spain’s only living survivor of a pandemic said to be the deadliest in human history – has a warning as the world faces off against Covid-19. “Be careful,” he said. “I don’t want to see the same thing repeated. It claimed so many lives.”
The 1918 flu, known as the Spanish flu after the country’s press were among the first to report on it, killed between 50 and 100 million people around the world.
In Ameal Peña’s town of Luarca it claimed 500 lives – a quarter of the town’s population of 2,000. He watched from his window as a steady stream of funeral processions made their way to the cemetery.
In autumn 1918 he became the only one of his seven siblings to catch the flu. “I still can’t figure out how I’m here,” Ameal Peña, now 105, told the newspaper El Mundo. “When I woke up I could barely walk. I had to crawl on my hands and knees.” As he wrestled with a relentless fever, a doctor prescribed vapours of boiled eucalyptus and seaweed.
In recent weeks Ameal Peña has watched anxiously as another pandemic has developed. Spain has been among the hardest-hit countries, with 1,720 deaths and counting.
“He knows exactly what is happening with the coronavirus,” his daughter Anunciata told El Mundo. “Since he lived through all that, he’s having a hard time now. He’s afraid that something similar will happen again, even though we’re living in very different times.”
While the fear unleashed by both pandemics is similar, scientific advances have allowed for this virus to be isolated, antiviral drugs tested and complex medical treatments to be carried out.
Across the Atlantic another survivor of the 1918 flu, 107-year-old Joe Newman, offered his perspective. “There are those of us who say, well, this too shall go away. And it will,” the resident of Sarasota, Florida, told NBC News. “But at what cost, at what expense?”
Newman urged people to lean on each other for support. “You have to be my crutch. I have to be yours. It’s been that way through every crisis we’ve had,” he said. “And then we find, when we do look back, that is what got us through it.”
