Opinion: The white scarf on the door: a life-saving lesson from the 1918 Spanish flu
In 1918, a white scarf tied to the door of my grandmother’s family’s apartment on the North Side of Chicago alerted the community to a virus residing within. My grandmother, then age 3, was one of 500 million people worldwide — one-third of the planet’s population— who was infected with what came to be known as the Spanish influenza. It killed an estimated 50 million people.
She was quarantined in her room, unable to communicate with the outside world. Her parents and older sister stayed in their apartment, heeding city-wide warnings to avoid exposing others in their community to the disease.
