When officials announced that the Spanish flu pandemic was on the wane in Seattle back in 1918, people poured into the streets in celebration.
It happened to coincide with the end of World War I, giving double cause for joy. But the demise of the disease was a major part of the revelry.
"The Flu Ban is Lifted!" trumpeted a clothing store ad in the Seattle Daily Times, in November 1918, inviting everyone to come back downtown after weeks of lockdowns and quarantines.
"Seattle Now Unmuzzled" read a headline, above an article on how the public had "thrown its masks in the stove, piled the breakfast dishes in the sink and hit for town on the first available street car."
"The influenza masks were forgotten," the Times reported, "except that they were used instead to be waved from windows and doorways by cheering clerks."
Now that's how to end a pandemic. Send it out in a blaze, or a mass doffing of the mask.
The hitch, as we now know, is the pandemic hadn't really ended. Within a few months, Seattle had reinstituted a quarantine, locking more than 1,000 stricken residents inside their own homes, during a new wave of the Spanish flu.
I'm recalling all this because the other day, a top health official in Seattle said what we've been pining to hear during this two-year slog: That the great coronavirus pandemic is ending.