We turn to prior epidemics and pandemics, to locate where we stand historically, and to answer how we may measure our responses today. To this extent we look at the Bombay Plague of 1896, for its legal impact in crafting the Epidemics Act of 1897, the Spanish Flu of 1918, for its deadliness and magnitude, and the Surat Plague of 1994, for the scale of migration that proceeded from misinformation, as well as the after-effect on the city's administration.
We look at digitized archives and oral histories for these disease outbreaks, to see what they tell us about how people have recorded and remember pandemic through time.