One of my coping mechanisms for this pandemic situation has been looking at historical documents. I’m not sure why.
A month ago when we were first processing the magnitude of this pandemic, my mother-in-law told me this wasn’t her first experience with this sort of thing — she had survived the “Asian Flu.” I had never heard of this before, but Google had. I learned that this strain of flu (H2N2) spread around the world and took around 1-2 million lives, including 7000 in Canada. This was the first time a vaccine was developed in response to a pandemic.
I highly recommend watching the old timey video of how the CBC covered this back in the day.
It’s really interesting to look at the response to this mid-century pandemic. It is also incredibly difficult to find much information about it in Canada. One bit of information that really piqued my interest is that there was apparently a significant outbreak in Sudbury, Ontario with 6000 cases (at the time, around 10% of the population). I would be really interested to know about municipal and school responses to this, but the archival records for this are not easy to find and would probably require a physical trip to the city or provincial archives, which is not possible right now. The Sudbury newspapers archives from that time that are available online do not contain any information – at least that I can find (I’ve spent a good deal of time digging and even asking a city archivist in Sudbury!). Maybe they are in French or in a newspaper I’m not aware of. I will look further (I have the time).
I found a few articles about the flu on ProQuest, but they seem to have been focused on school absenteeism rather than school closures, although this virus seems to have hit young people rather hard. You can see the terms I was interested are still highlighted.
The flu was global – here is an article about Russia too.
I am just using this post to keep track of my recreational research. Maybe other people are interested in the “lesser known pandemics” and our institutional responses to them. If you know of further resources, please send me an email.
