Looking back at the Spanish flu pandemic
Panic over the 1918 outbreak hadn’t hit as they celebrated armistice
The crowds of people on the streets of St. Catharines were shoulder to shoulder, waving flags to celebrate the end of the First World War.
They flooded downtown streets on Nov. 11, 1918, arriving from their beds and from overnight factory shifts when news broke that an armistice agreement was signed.
The Spanish influenza pandemic was already in full swing as people stood listening to speeches, bands and watching aircraft flybys.
“When you look at the pictures, nobody’s wearing masks. Everybody’s standing right up almost on top of each other,” said Kathleen Powell, curator of the St. Catharines museum.
“I’m sure that there were peo- ple that got sick from the Span- ish influenza as a result of that, particularly the events around the victory in Europe from the First World War.”
A board of health report published in The St. Catharines Standard on Nov. 20, 1918, said the city had suffered from 1,000 cases of influenza and had 61 deaths at that time.
By the end of the pandemic, 250 St. Catharines residents out of a population of 19,100 would die of Spanish flu — roughly the same number from the community killed in the First World War.
But when the victory celebrations happened in the streets on Nov. 11, Spanish influenza wasn’t top of mind. The war was over.
“It wasn’t as bad at that point yet. It hadn’t gotten to this proportion where they were starting to panic about it, essentially,” Powell said, adding that would come the following month. “It was just kind of like how things kind of moved along here, right?”
The St. Catharines museum did extensive research for an outbreak exhibit in early 2019 to mark the 100th anniversary of the Spanish flu epidemic. It’s proved timelier than ever.
St. Catharines residents at the time were living through similar safety measures and economic uncertainty, with less technology, less advanced health care and an overseas war on top of it all.
Powell said that after a bad flu outbreak the season prior, a new influenza arrived in fall 1918, which was very virulent, very serious and affected young and healthy people the most.
“It was really catchy and once you got it, it was very quick. You could potentially be showing symptoms in the morning and by the evening you were on the brink of death,” Powell said. The electron microscope hadn’t been invented yet, so scientists couldn’t see the virus under the microscope. Powell said they didn’t have a great handle on what was causing the virus, though they knew it was an influenza.
She said the experience of residents at the start of the pandemic would have been similar to what residents were going through here a few weeks ago.
In the beginning, nobody really knew what was happening or what to do about it. People were advised to go about their business, but in a cautious way. That was followed by debates about how much business should be closed and worries about the economy.
Powell said there were debates at local council meetings about whether or not they should close down movie houses or introduce what we would now call social distancing. Discussions took place across the country about whether people should wear masks.
Schools were closed for a time because so many children were off sick.
Powell said a lot of our more formalized health-care system in Canada came about because of the Spanish influenza and the response to that. Each community had its response, but a more overarching system developed after the pandemic.
St. Catharines had one hospital at the time and it had to close because there were so many cases that it couldn’t take any more.
“They were actually telling people they had to try and weather it out at home if they could and not to come to the hospital,” Powell said.
Some isolation hospitals for Spanish influenza opened, including on the top floor of the Welland Hotel at Ontario and King streets and at Ridley College for its students.
Students from Mack Training School for Nurses were graduated early so they could help on the front lines. Health-care workers were getting sick.
Much like today, there were “quack cures” being peddled in 1918, such as eating raw onions, taking certain vitamins or putting an infected person in full wet clothing in front of an open window on a cold day to shiver the virus out of the body.
Powell said the impact of the Spanish flu on St. Catharines was huge, but the area fared well compared to other communities, some of which had 50 per cent mortality rates. Worldwide, 50 million people died.
The pandemic lasted from 1918 to early 1919. The next season, the virus was less virulent and wasn’t as fatal.
Niagara’s acting medical officer of health, Dr. Mustafa Hirji, said the lesson to take away was that 27 per cent of the population got the Spanish flu and at that point it didn’t have enough people to infect to continue to be a big outbreak. The virus didn’t go away, but fell on the back burner as more of a slow burn of infection.
Hirji said that’s similar to what’s been seen with other respiratory viruses, such as the H1N1 pandemic in 2009 when about 21 per cent of the population was infected, and seasonal influenza, which affects about 20 per cent of the population. He said if 25 to 30 per cent of the population develop immunity to COVID-19, an uncontrolled spread in society will likely stop. It will still spread, but the danger of it hitting intensive care units and maxing them out will go away.
“The big question for us is how do we get to that 25 to 30 per cent immunity?”
He said the plan by the province is to try to control spread with restricted measures and keep it controlled until there’s a vaccine. People will likely have to take measures to protect themselves year round, as COVID-19 doesn’t seem to be seasonal like the Spanish flu and is transmitted in hot climates as well.
Powell said living through the COVID-19 pandemic has given her a new perspective on the mental strain residents were dealing with during the Spanish influenza pandemic.
“We’re already dealing with how is the community impacted by the war and all of the things that we had to do to support the war effort in Canada, and then this thing comes up,” she said. “How do you pivot what you’re already doing to adjust to dealing with a whole other crisis situation that you have going on? It must have been unreal at the time.”