WHO declares a pandemic. Stay safe. Some history lessons on the last pandemic to hit India that claimed over 15 million lives or 6% of the population- the Influenza or Spanish Flu of 1918-19- through this thread with newspaper articles of that time.👇🏼
It began with a simple headline 'The Fever Epidemic', reported in the Times of India (TOI) on June 25, 1918, with a simple remedy "Go to bed and not to worry". 
Things began to get more serious next month with news filtering in from different cities of the 'Influenza', as reported on July 19, 1918, under the TOI headline 'The Influenza Epidemic'.
Three months later, on Oct 19, 1918, the TOI reported 'The Spread of Influenza', pointing out to the broken health system and that the best recourse was to 'organize self-help'.
Five months later, on March 6, 1919, the TOI had a seemingly calm headline: Six Million Deaths-Influenza's Toll in India, describing the Sanitary Commissioner's preliminary report, and highlighting the 'inadequate arrangements'.
Two years later, on March 21, 1921, by when the mayhem was over and much learning had taken place, these were the precautions described by the TOI during a short-lived outbreak, much of which will strike us as being extremely familiar today.
Here's an article on the Influenza 1918 episode published recently in the Caravan magazine in Oct 2018. caravanmagazine.in/history/spanis…
Here's the academic counterpart by I. D. Mills in a 1986 paper in the Indian Economic and Social History Review journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.117…
And here's re-posting the macroeconomic cost of Influenza 1918- India's worst year on record.
