PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Residents at a Delaware County senior living facility have created a COVID-19 time capsule because of a lesson learned after the Spanish flu pandemic 100 years ago.
"I think that it was immediately recognized that this was an historically significant event," said Sally Shabaker, a retired archivist who lives at Whitehorse Village in Newtown Square
She has led the charge to put the time capsule together.
"We put in various documents. We put in face masks, a digital thermometer — that's used everywhere now. We had things like hand sanitizer and sanitary wipes," she said.
"One of the most humorous was toilet paper, because of the rush initially that there was for toilet paper altogether."
She says they put 99 items in the capsule to help document the first year of the coronavirus pandemic.
"One of my volunteers did a timeline of things that happened at Whitehorse Village."
She says residents will revisit the capsule in 10 years and again in 25 years.
"In the years to come, we thought that people would need a reminder of what happened and what could happen again. We wanted people to know how the people at Whitehorse Village dealt with the COVID virus."
Shabaker says a lot of people wanted to forget about the Spanish flu epidemic after it happened. As a result, she said, information about it was hard to come by.
"We had very little to refer to, even scientifically, about what happened with the Spanish flu epidemic. So we wanted to keep a record [of the coronavirus pandemic] so that people would be able to see and remember what happened."