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Tyra Skinner had already been violently sick three times when doctors at Kent’s William Harvey hospital realised something was badly wrong. The 20-year-old was rushed into critical care, racked with a pounding headache, a stiff neck and excruciating pain – the hallmark symptoms of meningitis, the disease that had already claimed two young lives in Kent.“She could hardly move, she was in a foetal position. She was so cramped up and sore,” her father, Dale Skinner, 42, told the Guardian. “It was horrendous, to be honest, to see her so helpless and in so much pain.”The Canterbury Christ Church University student was quickly given antibiotics and fluids before tests confirmed her family’s worst fears: she had meningitis. Her condition has since improved, but she is expected to remain in hospital for at least another week.Ten days before her admission on Monday, Skinner had been at Club Chemistry, the nightclub in Canterbury that health officials believe was at the centre of a “super-spreader” event.Experts are still trying to understand how a cluster of infections linked to the nightclub escalated into a public health incident requiring a national response, with a case now reported in London.The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said on Friday there had been 29 confirmed or suspected cases of meningitis. Of the 18 confirmed cases, 13 are known to be caused by the meningitis B strain. All 29 have required hospital admission. More than 9,800 courses of antibiotics and 2,360 vaccines have been administered to eligible people in Kent.Anyone who attended Club Chemistry from 5 March onwards would be vaccinated, the health secretary said. Photograph: Carlos Jasso/AFP/Getty ImagesProf Dr Anjan Ghosh, the director of public health at Kent county council, said: “As more cases are getting known, they all have a back history back to [Club Chemistry].” Known patients visited the venue on 5, 6 or 7 March, during which an estimated 4,800 people are thought to have attended.“What probably happened in the club is you had loads of people in close contact, probably sharing vapes, sharing drinks. It’s a club setting, so probably there was intimacy. So all those things combined to contribute to the spread of this bacteria,” said Ghosh.Prof Dr Anjan Ghosh. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA MediaFor Chelsea Abbott, a 19-year-old college student from Herne Bay who visited the club on 5 and 12 March, that rang true.“Everyone’s just kissing each other, or you go to the smoking area and someone’s like, ‘have you got a vape?’ because their vape died and then you share it,” she said. “Once you’re drunk, you’ll share your vape with this person, that person, and like 10 people have had your vape.“Or someone’s like: ‘Let me get a sip of your drink.’ Then you look over and someone’s making out with someone, and then they’re making out with someone else. So it’s definitely a very easy place for bacteria to spread, which is probably why it spread so much in the first place.”By Sunday 15 March, Juliette Kenny, an 18-year-old sixth-form pupil at Queen Elizabeth’s grammar school in Faversham, had died, as had an unnamed student from the University of Kent.People queue for the MenB vaccine at the University of Kent campus in Canterbury. Photograph: Carl Court/Getty ImagesThe UKHSA said it was notified about the first case on Friday 13 March and began tracing contacts and offering antibiotics “as a matter of urgency”. Only two days later at 6pm did it issue a public health alert. The agency also contacted Louise Jones-Roberts, the owner of Club Chemistry, via the club’s Instagram account, warning that a case had been confirmed among her recent customers.Jones-Roberts said she was initially dumbfounded. “We all have an understanding of how things like flu and coronavirus are transmitted because we were beaten around the head with it during Covid, but this is different,” she said. “I’m a parent and [meningitis] is the thing that everyone is terrified of. I said, look, we’ve just got to tell people now what the symptoms are and what to do if they’ve got them.”Meanwhile, unaware of the outbreak, many students who did not have exams in the final week of term had travelled to their homes across the country for Mother’s Day. Others, such as the University of Kent law student Kishan Mistri, remained on campus.The 20-year-old first became aware of the infections via a story on the BBC at about 7.30pm on Sunday. Earlier in the afternoon, he had noticed ambulances and fire engines outside Hut 8, a fast-food outlet on campus near student accommodation. Panicked and confused, he messaged friends, before his social media feeds and group chats filled with videos of emergency responders in hazmat suits and horrifying footage of a sick student.“The poor boy looked terribly ill getting wheeled out of [student] accommodation. It was absolutely heartbreaking. He looked super ill. I have never seen anyone look that ill before,” he recalled. “The tensions in our flat and how people felt, it was something that I’ve never felt since Covid. It was scarier.”A student receives the MenB vaccine at the University of Kent sports hall. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty ImagesStudents revising for exams in the library quickly began packing up their things as the news of the outbreak started making headlines.“It’s exam season. Everyone was everywhere,” said Praise, a student of medicine. “Then we start getting sent things from people. It’s a screenshot of BBC News, saying that two people passed away. Then we’re seeing one by one people just leave [the library]. It was empty. You can literally walk and hear a pin drop. That’s how quiet it was.”At 11pm that night, an email told Mistri and some other students that the exams they were due to sit the following day had been postponed.Mistri and other students who spoke to the Guardian described the University of Kent’s initial response as slow and inadequate. Lilia Thomson-Amato, a marketing student, who had travelled home to Thanet, 15 miles from Canterbury, for Mother’s Day, said she did not get an email from the university about the outbreak until 9.30pm on Sunday. It included a message from the UKHSA and warned: “If you think you may have symptoms, please get medical advice urgently.”“It was a real disappointment from the university, how they initially handled things,” said Thomson-Amato. “I didn’t feel their approach was completely appropriate for the scale of what was actually going on, considering one of their students had died.”One university staff member also criticised the slow response, saying she was not informed until 8.30pm on Sunday. She said workers were only offered the vaccine on Thursday – four days after the outbreak was made public. “It was imperative that on campus students were prioritised,” she said, and while she felt grateful for the support now being offered to staff, “it’s also frustrating that it feels like an afterthought”.Many students fled the university amid the panic and confusion, with some getting coaches at 4am on Monday and one booking a last-minute flight back to the Bahamas.“[The university] is like a ghost town now. It’s very quiet where all the students have gone home,” the staff member said earlier this week. “I’ve seen photographs of paramedics going into [campus buildings] in hazmat suits. It’s disconcerting … There are staff buildings [and] catering outlets quite close to those. It’s put me off going up to campus, I’ll say that.”A University of Kent spokesperson said: “This is a regional public health matter and not specific to the university, so the response is being led by the UK Health Security Agency. We contacted our staff and students as soon as guidance from UKHSA allowed, and are continuing to do so while the situation unfolds.”On Wednesday afternoon, students returned to campus in face masks and queued for the MenB vaccine. Among them was Katie Moore, an 18-year-old studying law with criminology, who also received a course of antibiotics after realising she might have been exposed to the infection at Club Chemistry on 7 March.She said one of her friends, a Canterbury Christ Church student, was taken into intensive care on Monday with meningitis. “She’s still in the hospital now. She was in her uni accommodation, rang her mum, said: ‘I really don’t feel well,’ and ended up being taken in an ambulance into hospital.”Wes Streeting said more people would be vaccinated. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty ImagesOn a visit to the University of Kent on Thursday, the health secretary, Wes Streeting, said more people affected by the meningitis outbreak would be vaccinated, including students who had travelled home and anyone who attended Club Chemistry from 5 March onwards, alongside sixth-formers at four schools and other university students in Canterbury.Ghosh pointed out that meningitis has an incubation periods of two to 10 days, meaning anyone who was infected at the club should have been showing symptoms by Tuesday 17 March.“In theory, from now on, if there are new cases emerging, there is a possibility they are from secondary transmission,” he said. Such an outcome would suggest that meningitis was now spreading in the community.However, the future remains uncertain. “Because we don’t know in the next few days or weeks whether there’s onward transmission that’s happening or not,” he said. But he also offered reassurance to those grappling with anxiety. “The memories of Covid have not gone, and that was quite traumatic for a lot of people. But this is definitely not Covid – it’s not like a rampant, marauding virus that’s spreading around.”
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