is this an actual mask on the cat or is it it’s natural fur colour?

Im going with actual mask, people during the 1918 flu were hard core about it. Making their idiot grandchildren look like the dumbest fucks for hundreds of years

there were stories about the law enforcement sitting outside of small towns armed to the teeth enforcing the mask mandates for anyone entering the town

and just a couple generations later, idiots were trying to use firearms to enforce the spread of a deadly disease.... Americans are fucking idiots (I should know, I am an American)

there were idiots back then, too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Mask_League_of_San_Francisco

Members of the anti-mask league also agitated for San Francisco Mayor James Rolph Jr., to resign if he did not repeal the ordinance. The president of the League, suffragist, attorney, and labor rights activist Mrs. E.C. Harrington, was a fierce critic of the mayor, and it has been suggested that the anti-mask league protests were politically motivated.

this has not changed.
also as a European, we also excelled in idiocy during covid periods and had our fair share of anti-vaxxers and anti-masks crowd that staged some mass protest and riots, in one case they were even about to storm the german parliament

Cats can catch the flu from people, birds, and other cats. A number of them also caught and died from covid.

The more things change, the more idiots stay exactly the same.

Yep. 100 years before COVID, enough people understood enough about disease to recognize the benefit of masking and even moving services outdoors for more space and air circulation. Idiots ruined those efforts and made the problem much worse than it needed to be.

The world's desire to move on from the flu pandemic effectively erased it from generational memory. Not enough lessons were learned apparently, and so we saw a repeat of the whole thing under COVID following yet another anti-mask crowd that threw tantrums like it was some unprecedented cruelty that they were being subjected to.

If there's one thing we can do following COVID, it's building more monuments that list the names of all who died. Maybe with their political affiliation, too.