MANDATORY MASKS, SHUTTERED THEATRES AND CONFUSING RULES: THE 1918 SPANISH FLU PANDEMIC AND ITS SIMILARITIES WITH TODAY
In the fall of 1918, many small towns in Canada felt eerily desolate.
In Erickson, Man., the railway station master was nowhere to be seen. The hotel and stores were closed. Bags of unsorted mail piled up in the shuttered post office.
In larger cities, people were dying in such large numbers that they couldn’t be interred as usual. Montreal ran out of coffins and used delivery wagons as makeshift hearses. In Toronto, bodies piled up in cemetery vaults, awaiting burial.
On the East Coast, the Cape Breton village of Marble Mountain also looked deserted. “The village store is left wide open, and those who are physically able serve themselves as no clerks are now available.”
Those details appeared a century ago in The Globe, the newspaper that would become The Globe and Mail. The full force of the Spanish influenza had reached North America just in the last months of the First World War, in a pandemic that eventually killed 50,000 Canadians and 50 million people around the world.
The reports in The Globe from 1918 contain eerie similarities with today’s pandemic.
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