CONCEALING THE TRUTH.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume V, Issue 1507, 11 December 1918, Page 4

CONCEALING THE TRUTH.

True to its policy of camouflaging ugly facts, the Government has liberated an entirely preposterous return of the Dominion's losses in the recent epidemic. We have already expressed ourselves very bluntly on this matter, but make no apology for doing so again. The figures announced last night by the Registrar-General are not only misleading: they are blatantly and stupidly absurd. Is the community's moral such a flimsy thing that we must all be treated like children and fools? And what could be so persistently alarming anyhow as this puerile policy of "Hush"? It is explained, of course, in a kind of official afterthought, that the numbers given are not deaths, but merely registrations. What conceivable use is a return like that? What the Dominion wants to know, and to know as soon as the Government itself knows, is the total cost of this calamity in human lives. At the very moment that the department is attempting this entirely misguided policy of allaying public anxiety one of the Dominion's leading clergymen announces from the public platform that our losses by influenza will approach our total deaths in four years of war. Let the whole thing be cleared up with the least possible delay. And there is another point. If the Health Department knows now definitely what this deadly sickness is, let us have the name quite candidly. In the Sydney papers latest to hand it is announced very emphatically that the complaint has been finally diagnosed as "epidemic pneumonia in its pandemic form." It is asserted, too, that this term has now been adopted, not only by the Australian and American Quarantine Services, but also by the Department of Health in New Zealand. Let us have the whole truth at once.