If Covid had hit in the 1980s

[wheretoyougonow]

I was a child/teenager in the 1980's an was thinking what challenges I would have faced as opposed to my children. So far I've come up with:

• Huge queues at the phone box to call your mates/boyfriend/girlfriend
• My dad reminding me how much it costs to make a call EVERY TIME I used the house phone
• No supermarket deliveries. I would have been dragged round the supermarket every week.
• No decent kids tv at the weekend bar Saturday morning.
• Waiting 6 million years (only slight exaggeration) for one computer game to load.
• No Amazon 😂😭😭😭😭

What have I missed?

Only 4 channels on the TV
Nowhere to buy craft materials - art shops, wool shops and haberdashers would have been closed
Any new clothes would have come solely from Grattan or Freeman's catalogue

Having to record the charts off the radio because you can't download music.

I imagine my parents would have taken us off to our secluded holiday place. Days of fishing, swimming and general running about. We could have lived quite cheaply there. (Father self employed, mother seasonal in an office job). We might have gone to the local village school or not bothered at all.

Oh wow! I was a teen in the eighties. Seriously doesn't bear thinking about. Only four TV channels. No internet. No mobile phones. Sharing a bedroom with my two sisters!!!!

Lack of social media and resultant hysteria would have made it much more low key. I doubt people would have registered it as more serious than one of the mid-century flu pandemics.

Nothing would have been closed down

Thatcher instead of Johnson

Neighbours would have pulled together and supported each other.

No need for on line learning (obviously it didn't exist anyway) as you could have worked through your textbooks and watched school tv.

The thing is though, without computers no one could realistically have worked from home. So I guess all us kids with working parents would have had to go to school still... Or maybe all the mums would have been pressured to give up their jobs?

I dunno but I bet the pop man would have been classed as an essential worker.

Mrs Thatcher would not have dithered. Police would have property enforced restrictions. Office work would probably have been a three day week or something of that kind.

Much fewer people went on skiing trips in February, so far fewer people would have brought the virus in. Assuming it got to Europe at all.

I was a child in the 80s, I would have been in school as the child of two primary teachers.

I think @Flyonawalk has it... It would have been much more low key without hysterical media/social media, and without the ability to work at home, life would have carried on largely as normal.

I dunno whether mums would have given up work or whether they’d have formed a ‘co-operative’ with neighbours? Or kids just left home alone younger than we might do now?

Oh man, I forgot about the Freemans catalogue, Happy Days.

@HerRoyalNotness that sounds idyllic. Can we all go now please?

There’d have been a whole load of Tupperware in use. And the chest freezer would come into its own

We'd still be many years away from a working vaccine.

Schools programmes every morning on the telly - Words and Pictures and Picture Box etc. If only they’d think of doing that now...

@carlaCox

The thing is though, without computers no one could realistically have worked from home. So I guess all us kids with working parents would have had to go to school still... Or maybe all the mums would have been pressured to give up their jobs?

A lof of mums were at home and it was also more acceptable to leave young children at home on their own.

Puppymonkey thought I saw BBC have?

Nothing ...you'd never have known about it..a few extra flu cases , tragic in the few younger ( under fifties ) victims and a lot of elderly in hospital and care homes but mostly put down to the "The Old Persons Friend" ( pneumonia), which was seen as a blessing . No lockdown , just perhaps an awareness of this was a bad year.

@PuppyMonkey

Schools programmes every morning on the telly - Words and Pictures and Picture Box etc. If only they’d think of doing that now...

I wish they'd bring back Words and Pictures

A Lot of people would have died.

China was still pretty much a closed country at the beginning of the 80's and was only just starting to open up. We would probably have never even heard of Covid, let alone have it spread round the world at high speed.