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They pose shoulder-to-shoulder in the doorway of the government telephone building, white gauze masks covering their faces from the cheekbones down. Though rendered in black and white, their eyes are piercing. Beneath her mask, one of the women appears to smile.

More than 100 years ago, four female telephone operators in High River became the face of the Spanish flu pandemic in Alberta. The flu ultimately killed around 50 million people — more than the entire First World War — among them 3,300 Albertans.

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For the foreseeable future, Albertans living under the threat of COVID-19 will see circumstances that wouldn’t be unfamiliar to those who survived the 1918 pandemic. It was a time before television, regular commercial air travel, and antibiotics, but the parallels to today are striking.

Swathes of society shut down in an effort to contain the virus. Health officials urged people to stay home. Schools, theatres and places of worship closed. Bars would have been ordered to shut their doors, too, if prohibition hadn’t shuttered them two years earlier.