How Seattle reopened after the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic

History, no doubt, has a strange way of repeating itself.

Just like during the COVID-19 pandemic, Seattle faced a rigid quarantine that confined residents to their homes, placed bans on large gatherings, closed businesses and ordered wearing masks in public during the Spanish Flu outbreak of 1918.

"In many ways, the Spanish Flu was a forgotten epidemic, as the nation rushed headlong into the Roaring Twenties and tried to forget the bad old days of 1918-1919," said Leonard Garfield, the executive director of Seattle's Museum of History & Industry.

But unlike Gov. Jay Inslee's phased approach to reopen the state county-by-county based on the number of confirmed cases, Seattle's reopening of society following quarantine in 1918 was abrupt, and consequently saw another deadly wave of the illness in the early months of 1919. The premature easing of quarantine rules led to a resurgence of cases that could have been prevented, and the threat of a second quarantine loomed over the city.

The city-mandated quarantine in 1918 was much like the stay-home orders the city is under today with the novel coronavirus to promote social distancing and slow the spread of the virus. As published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Oct. 6, 1918, these were the health restrictions put into place over the city:

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