To ask why The Asian Flu pandemic in 1968/69 didn't cause the world to shut down?

[Whatsthis1515]

I have been reading about the Asian Flu pandemic in 1968-69, which was also a novel virus, and was surprised to see that there wasn't a lock down etc. Over a million people died of it globally.

I can't help but wonder if the reason the world is in lockdown with covid 19 is because of the media/social media and the internet. It causes mass panic.

I am wondering what everyone else's thoughts are?

I am not a conspiracy theorist btw, but I am wondering why it's so different this time. Being a human being is risky, and I struggle to understand why we have reacted so differently this time and am genuinely interested in if it because of how freely we can access media to panic us and the governments world wide have had to react to that?

I think there was also a strain of flu in 2004 where 17,000 in the UK died. I wasn't even aware of it at the time, yet that's a huge number of people.

Found this an interesting read. Apart from one or two, everyone seems to be having a pleasant enough discussion. Quite refreshing to be able to talk about it without folk getting hysterical and/or unbelievably rude. Thanks OP

Eaglesjulesk

What figures make you think Sweden’s corona strategy is worse than the uk’s approach?

Yes Sweden were meant to have 40000 deaths by now if they didn’t do a lockdown at least the same as the UK.

Some social distancing took place during Hong Kong flu, advice was put in newspapers etc. I was born in 1968 and I asked my dad about it. He said that they didn’t see there was much they could do about it and of course there wasn’t the rolling news jumping on every development. They were more used to living with dangerous illnesses.

This excellent lecture by Chris Whitty covers the difference between the pandemics in the last century:

COVID-19 with Chris Whitty
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BdPKpWbxTg

Lecture is long but really easy to follow and very worth it.

It was recorded at Gresham College on 30 April, so fairly good for where we are now – although he points out that a year or more hence a lot of what he's saying will need updating and correcting.

Madein1995 "I truly hate this lockdown and believe it's being kept going to save face" You know a third of the global population is on coronavirus lockdown right? It's not just something Boris thought up to o annoy you.

In particular, Whitty talks about the force of infection and the case mortality, and how some epidemics fell away because they managed to get R to below 1.

I don't recall the whole lecture, but I think it answers a lot of the questions on this thread.

@Nottherealslimshady
No not a good thing at all, but I do think being a human carries a huge risk...viruses, diseases etc. We can't prevent all deaths and disease sadly

My late Dad nearly died from a bad strain of flu in the mid/late 1950s. I don't know much about it, or what treatment (if any) he had.

@PerkingFaintly
Great thanks, will.have a watch of it.

This is a good article explaining that Sweden’s ‘R’ is below 1 without a full scale Lockdown

www.spectator.co.uk/article/sweden-tames-its-r-number-without-lockdown

The imperial college forecast that 500,000 could die without a lockdown has been proved very wrong by Sweden.

I think it was in the late 50s OP, when Harold Macmillan was PM. It killed about 60,000 people in the UK. Apparently some schools closed for a while and that was about it!

There were many TB epidemics in the 40s and polio outbreaks in the 50s and they killed millions worldwide. Polio was asymptomatic in most people, not unlike C19.

Perhaps people then were more fatalistic and accepted that many would die in epidemics? I know that sounds awful, and obviously there was a desperate need to find a polio vaccine because of how children were suffering, but the idea of closing society down would have seemed bizarre.

I have just been reading about Sweden with its rejection of lockdown and its voluntary distancing policy, and they have had 2600 deaths out of a population of 10 million, which is still far better than the UK has managed with 66 million...the whole thing is bizarre. With hindsight, the best approach would have been that of Taiwan/Singapore - quarantine all Chinese arrivals from the get-go. (Think they started early January)The virus would not have spread so uncontrollably.

Surely the main reason is because lockdown would not have been remotely possible. It’s only modern communications and especially the internet that makes lockdown even slightly manageable.

Pre internet hardly anyone could have worked from home. People wouldn’t have been able to order food and other supplies to be delivered. We also weren’t a wealthy enough country to fund huge numbers not working for months. (We still aren’t to be honest, but even less so in 1968, and as I say the numbers able to wfh would have been tiny).

We were also, I think, more phlegmatic about death. It was more common. People lived far less long. We didn’t regard saving lives as automatically outweighing everything else.

I was wondering that too. Then I got too bored of the bollocks responses you got.

This is the slide from the Chris Whitty lecture on the Asian and Hong Kong flu

Flu is generally less infectious than COVID-19 and you are less likely to spread it before you have symptoms. COVID-19 is more easily spread than flu so I suspect the concern was that if flu can kill 1m what will this do.

Chilipeanuts

I was also born in 57. I remember the HK flu, though as best I can remember I didn't get it. It was certainly in the papers, but, being 11, I probably didn't worry much. My DF was a GP and i vaguely remember him being rushed off his feet with it.

My DM had the Asian flu in 57 about a month before I was born, so I don't know whether that would have affected me at all. She would tell the story of how ill she was with it.

@eaglejulesk Of course people have always valued human life Does this include when slavery was the norm? What about apartheid, plenty of lynchings to go around there, well past the 60s? Maggie Thatcher labelling the ANC a terrorist organization in the 80s and many Brits agreed, does that count at all?

My examples were intended to rebut the assertion of a pp that human life has "always" been valued, which is simply a falsehood. The world today is the best it has ever been in terms of quality of life, access to healthcare, human rights, etc. etc., by any measure at all.

Of course human beings have always loved their loved ones. The question is whether global healthcare policy reflected as much respect for human life on a societal level in the 1960s compared to today... which is a whole different kettle of fish.

The asian flu pandemic happened when I was about 5 years old, My father stopped getting the tube to go to work and rode his bike instead.
Hardly anyone went abroad for holidays in the 1950's and all the shops were small and you shopped locally.
The main social gatherings were church and the pub. (I didn't go to the pub of course) but I remember at church people leaving gaps between pews in the church, because of the 'flu.
One of my brothers friends lost his Mum to Asian Flu'.
To be honest in the1950's people were more worried about getting TB or Pneumonia, often death sentences at the time.

Because 9afar as I am aware), Asian flu was a variety of flu - although it was novel, it was n illness that there was a degree of immunity to, and vaccines could be adapted. There was also an awareness of how it was transmitted, incubation periods, immunity etc

Corona-virus has flu-like symptoms but is NOT a form of flu - it's a completely unknown illness. We don't know exactly how it is transmitted, remains virulent, whether people develop immunity, to can be re-infected, or what long-term damage it can cause to the respiratory and circulatory systems.

That's rather an over-simplistic comparison.

Also:
Considering 99% who get it, live, I think there is some overreaction happening.
If you were asked to put your kids on a fairground ride where 1 out of every 100 would die, would you do it?

Most people in the population could well get this (80%). That's a huge number of deaths in the UK if we took no precautions, just from the sheer number of people infected due to no-one having resistance to it. Not including deaths from other causes due to hospitals being overwhelmed and unable to treat all the Covid patients or all the every day heart attacks, cancers etc. You'd be looking at 500,000 or so deaths in the UK alone just from Covid, or 64 million across the whole world, if it was left to spread without restrictions.

There wasn't the population density then as there is now, either - and people didn't travel as far, or work as far away from their homes on average. This would have slowed transmission.

It's not as simple as that though,is it. You can avoid fairground rides quite easily. You cant avoid the outside forever

What @minipie said. This kind of lockdown wasn't possible & our tolerance for harm was much higher.

I was saying to someone earlier how this would have been very, very different without social media and 24:7 rolling news

There would be way less hysteria

We value human life more now

What utter rubbush!!!!!!!!!!!! The feeling of superiority demonstrated by many posters on here is mind-blowing.

There was a hell of a lot fewer people in 1968. As in 3.5 billion. Compared to 7.8 billion now. Thus one might conclude that, globally, people come into contact with more people and live closer together then in 1968.