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. » | Ashifa Kassam in Madrid | Sunday, March 22, 2020
