Spanish Flu in Creston, British Columbia 1918

My grandmother was born in 1906 in Alberta, Canada. She and her family moved to Creston, British Columbia a few year later and were there when the Spanish Flu hit toward the end of WW I. I find it interesting to read the stories about the Spanish Flu in the local newspaper, the "Creston Review" which was a weekly.

The parallels to today are amazing, but, I guess, not surprising. The same shut down of schools and businesses, banning of public meetings, urging citizens to not congregate or loiter, furloughed teachers in Vancouver coming home for their "enforced vacations," the public health officer banning all public gatherings, sanitizing, were in effect then as now. There is an item about how the healthcare workers were all overworked. Please went out for more supplies and healthcare volunteers.

What is conspicuously missing back then is the hysteria and hyperbole we have today. There are also no vitriolic stories about the federal government in Ottawa and deranged criticism of the Prime Minister. In fact, all I find in this small town weekly are local stories...not a single story at the national / country level.

There are heart-wrenching stories of kids being orphaned with parents passing within days of each other, otherwise healthy adults in their 40s dying within four days.

I like the blurb about the "emergency" liquor store being opened and ten cases of whiskey being sold by noon. I wonder if it was sold as a disinfectant or for regular use.

The public reaction to the end of World War I was almost non-existent and there was no celebration.

I do not get the sense that the public was particularly discomfited by the actions taken by the health authorities. Unfortunately, the paper does not have a "Letters to the Editor" section.

There are heart-wrenching stories of kids being orphaned with parents passing within days of each other, otherwise healthy adults in their 40s dying within four days.

Which is NOTHING like this one

And they still carried life on better than us.

I’m sure the story about losing both parents was 1000x more common that with this one.

If you go to the 1880s/1890s....’fevers’ were fairly common, passing through a community, and you’d find a wide assortment of people dying from them. So I don’t think that the Spanish Flu (at least in the central point of the US) was that big of a deal.

It’s different if you start talking Baltimore, Philly, Boston, etc....where there are significant numbers, and a lot of people just never get entered into any city ‘death’ listing.

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