Looking Back at the Laws That Came With the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

variety.com:

By Klaritza Rico As the world works its way out of the COVID-19 pandemic, a run on specialized surgical masks capable of filtering out the virus has led to shortages in some areas.

Cloth masks are probably as hard to find at your local drugstore as soap, hand sanitizer and toilet paper. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention do not recommend the use of masks by healthy people.

Most aren’t fine enough to filter out airborne virus anyway, and the run on true antiviral masks has probably put health care workers at risk, forcing them to rely on less-effective ones while treating infected patients.

It’s an indication of how much has changed since the Spanish flu pandemic a century ago that in those years, masks were mandatory.