‘Across the world there are millions of dead. We can’t just let them disappear and be forgotten.’

While there are over 3,000 monuments to the First World War in the United Kingdom alone, there isn’t a single public memorial to the hundreds of thousands of Britons who died of the Spanish Flu. Why do we commemorate wars but not pandemics? And will COVID-19 be any different?

You can listen to my documentary on ‘Pandemic Amnesia’ for the CBC’s Ideas strand here.

Photo: A group of mask-wearers in Mill Valley, Calif., during the Spanish Flu of 1918. (Raymond Coyne/Lucretia Little History Room, Mill Valley Public Library/Public domain)