Thinking about the Spanish Flu in Bogotá in the Era of COVID-19

Introduction: The current COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated that although the disease indiscriminately attacks the population, the popular classes are particularly more exposed due to their conditions of life, which is similar to the Spanish flu epidemic that reached the Colombian capital in 1918. Development: In this study, we analyzed discourses that were built around the capital’s popular classes during the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918. The approach to primary sources, especially the graphic press of the time, accounts for the precariousness with which the poor, located in a peripheral depressed sector of the city, had to face a lethal disease that caused great confusion as it advanced rapidly through a city that lacked public health services. Whereas, the Bogotá elites, who tried to mitigate the crisis under the discourse of Christian charity, blamed the poor for their fate, which resulted in their lack of hygiene and foresight and their disorder. Conclusions: Today, a century after the flu epidemic in Bogotá and in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been evidenced in the face of a series of measures ordered by the national and local governments that include mandatory quarantines, the permanence of visions and discourses in which poor patients, far from being understood in their social reality, continue to be seen as a danger to the rest of society.