How Brazil dealt with past epidemics

“Avoid crowds, above all at night. Don’t make any visits. Take hygienic precautions with your nose and throat (…) Avoid fatigue or physical exertion. At the signs of the first symptoms, sick persons should go to bed, as rest will help the curing process and reduce complications and contagion. (…) The elderly should apply these precautions more rigorously.”

As fears over the Covid-19 pandemic begin to spread across Brazil and Latin America, the advice given above could easily have been included in a Health Ministry pamphlet. However, this excerpt was taken from the now-defunct newspaper Correio da Manhã, and printed in October 1918, to warn against Brazil’s worst-ever pandemic: the Spanish flu.

Brazil’s biggest epidemics

One of the deadliest pandemics in human history—claiming the most lives since the Black Plague crisis in the 14th century—the Spanish flu killed between 1 and 6 percent of the world’s population in the late 1910s, with some 35,000 deaths in Brazil.

The Spanish flu even claimed the life of Brazil’s president-elect Rodrigues Alves, who had previously served as president between 1902 and 1906, but was unable to take office for a second...