Meanwhile, Indigenous Canadians in some isolated communities across the North died in numbers so vast none were left to dig graves. The death toll in the Inuit community of Okak, Labrador, was so large that the place was abandoned. While deaths were high everywhere, a federal report published in 1919 calculated that Indigenous Canadians living on reserves died from the pandemic at more than five times the national average.
“While a lot of emphasis is placed on the virus itself, I don’t believe you can explain what happened in 1918 without considering the social circumstances of that time,” says historian-anthropologist Kandace Bogaert, Cleghorn Fellow in war and society at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont. She points to the movement of millions around the world for the war, crowded living conditions, inequality and even children returning to school in the fall as reasons the second wave was so deadly.
Finally, in December, the second wave petered out. A smaller, less virulent third wave washed through Canada and other parts of the world in early 1919. It hit the Montreal Canadiens so hard during the Stanley Cup final in April that the sixth game of the series with the Seattle Metropolitans was cancelled and no cup was awarded that season. Canadiens defenceman Joe Hall died of the flu in a Seattle hospital on April 5.
Between the war and the three waves of the Spanish Flu, people were numbed. One survivor told Pettigrew: “We got so we didn’t even mourn.”
One hundred years later, a new flu pandemic is considered inevitable by public health officials around the world, says Tam, Canada’s chief doctor.
Will it prove as deadly for Canadians? Or the world for that matter? No one knows. To be sure, much has improved over the century. People’s health was generally poorer then and, in Canada, they died an average of nearly 22 years earlier. Other infectious diseases, such as tuberculosis, were common, lowering resistance when the pandemic arrived.
Now, in place of face masks and goose grease, we have antibiotics, flu vaccines, daily antiviral medications and mechanical respiration. A universal flu vaccine, long promised, could be on the horizon in the next few years, says guru of flu Monto. And, thanks to the pandemic, we also have different attitudes toward health itself, says Humphries. Until 1918, health was seen as a personal and local responsibility. Now, it’s collective.
That has led to a public health infrastructure, hospital care and detailed global pandemic planning. As part of the planning, researchers across the world, including those at Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory, routinely examine flu viruses as they appear, sharing knowledge if something is amiss, Tam says. It’s a global early warning system.
And when the next pandemic virus emerges, labs will know how to sequence its genome swiftly, letting them calculate how lethal it will be. In Canada, that knowledge will trigger an information campaign to tell Canadians what to do. It’s a far cry from the wartime media censorship and outright propaganda of 1918.
Still, the world has changed in ways that could let a new pandemic flu virus thrive. Today, there are far more potentially infectible people on Earth — about 7.6 billion compared to about 1.5 billion in 1918. Far more are elderly and vulnerable. And we travel swiftly in vast numbers by air, great conduits for disease as the world discovered in 2003 when the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS coronavirus, arrived, and in 2009 when the latest pandemic flu virus began to spread. “We need to be as adaptable as the flu virus,” says Tam.
But the legacy of the once forgotten plague is still being calculated. Deaths from the war and the three waves of pandemic hollowed out a whole generation of young Canadians, a major demographic “catastrophe,” says Humphries.
What did it mean for Canada? That’s a project Laurier’s Bogaert is eager to take on. Now, more century-old records are being digitized and made public, and she is using them to measure how those intimate family losses reverberated through the generations and through Canada’s cultural memory.
As much as the Spanish Influenza has already told us, it still has tales to tell.