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Since early 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged both across the U.S. and the world, various photographs of masks worn during the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic were shared online, as we noted with other stories in the past. One such picture that was often posted on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram showed a woman sitting at a desk with a unique-looking mask over her nose. The social media posts claimed that the photograph showed a mask being worn in February 1919. In the picture, a hose could be seen going from the woman's nose to a mechanical device on the desk, which then extended to a second device with another hose. This was a real photograph that had been properly captioned by social media users. The COVID-19 vaccine makers at Pfizer once published a story that featured the black-and-white picture of the woman. The article referred to the device on the woman's face as a mechanical nozzle mask. It also described what the world was like during the Spanish flu pandemic: On Dec. 1, 2018, just a little over one year before the first COVID-19 case was recorded in the U.S., The Associated Press published an article about the origins and impact of what was then called the Spanish flu pandemic. It's estimated the virus contributed to the deaths of between 50 million and 100 million worldwide, representing between 3 percent and 5 percent of the world's population, the reporting said. The story also mentioned that the pandemic was believed to have originated not in Spain, as the name Spanish flu implied, but rather in Kansas: We weren't able to locate a name for the woman in the photograph, nor could we find credible records that listed an exact day of when it was captured. However, the picture was indeed real, as evidenced by this page on the Getty Images image-licensing website.
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