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.

So you think the Clean Air Act of 1956 had nothing to do with that smog, then, Mockers?!

Hmm. My mother was at school in the 60s. One child died in the school. They weren't particularly friends, but nevertheless my mother never forgot her or her name for the rest of her life.

I’ll guess people will be arguing next that everyone used to shrug at cholera, too. Those were the days...

That was the decisive and effective response. But at the time it was happening, there was no public debate about masks, no call for the shutdown of industry to stop the pollution, no outcry about overwhelmed hospitals. People quite literally sucked it up.

Mockers - there would not have been a Clean Air Act if that were true. Clearly some people were not content to suck it up.

Besides, people who could afford it bought smog masks

People acted after the event. At the time, the govt stalled and did a bit of a Bolsonaro.

It's all in The Crown epidose S1E4, "Act of God," as Churchill called it in Parliament.

The Crown is not a primary source! It is an TV programme designed to entertain, based on historical events!

Child mortality in 1968 in children aged 0-5 was 21.8 per thousand and in 2018 it was 4.26 per thousand

How many of those children died around childbirth though? Certainly in a school of a thousand children there weren't four or five deaths a year.

mrpumblechook - so you think it’s OK so long as the baby dies straight away?!

Besides, 0-5 is generally pre-school.

There is a huge difference in the conclusions we can draw concerning social attitudes towards death, if the death rate provided reflects a tragically high perinatal death rate.

According to this, the infant mortality rate (that's deaths of children under 1) was 18.7 deaths per 1000 in 1968. So the majority of the birth to 5 deaths quoted above were in the birth to 1 category. It wouldn't have made people nonchalent about other age groups dying from the flu.

www.closer.ac.uk/data/infant-mortality/

*Nonchalant

mrpumblechook - so you think it’s OK so long as the baby dies straight away?!

Of course not. My point is that was not a "different world" with regards to children dying. There were more deaths shortly after birth but after that it was very unusual and certainly not "accepted".

Besides, 0-5 is generally pre-school.

There weren't four or five children dying per thousand at nurseries/playgroups either.

I think the higher rate of infant mortality in the sixties could have been partly due to much higher rates of smoking, (increasing the risk of low birth weight and SIDS) no car safety belts or baby seats etc.

I don’t see the 1968 statistics as evidence that people found death any less upsetting, I see them as evidence that our healthcare system has moved on and is now far more sophisticated and successful, but also therefore more at risk of being overwhelmed, as it is juggling a lot more balls at the same time now than it was previously. And I don’t think cancer patients, for example, would appreciate being told that they would probably be dead already if this were 1968 because we are much better at treating things these days. I am fairly certain they would instead be somewhat upset that a novel virus is making it dangerous to treat them. We wouldn’t accept the mortality rates of infants in 2020 that had to be accepted in 1968, because technology and medicine have moved on. So why anyone is trying to argue everyone reacted better to pandemics in the past, as though they actually had any choice and as though the implications were precisely the same, I’m not really sure.

mrpumblechook - I think you will find that medicine has moved on quite a bit since 1968, however much you fondly try to deny it.

mrpumblechook - I think you will find that medicine has moved on quite a bit since 1968, however much you fondly try to deny it.

I haven't "fondly" tried to deny that medicine has moved on quite a bit. However it wasn't the dark ages and we did have antibiotics and other life-saving treatments. It was very unusual for children to die after the age of one.

Nobody ever suggested 1968 was the Dark Ages, though. It is certainly true that a higher proportion of children’s mothers died in childbirth then than now, that more children died between the ages of 0 and 5, that organ transplants were new and extremely rare (and rejection a strong possibility, due to lack of availability of the immunosuppresants that make covid 19 so dangerous to people who have had transplants), that life expectancy was around 10 years younger than now, that cancer treatments were far more basic, etc, etc.

Nobody ever suggested 1968 was the Dark Ages, though. It is certainly true that a higher proportion of children’s mothers died in childbirth then than now, that more children died between the ages of 0 and 5, that organ transplants were new and extremely rare (and rejection a strong possibility, due to lack of availability of the immunosuppresants that make covid 19 so dangerous to people who have had transplants), that life expectancy was around 10 years younger than now, that cancer treatments were far more basic, etc, etc

I'm not denying that you wouldn't expect to live that much beyond 70 or that childbirth was more risky. My point is that after childbirth it was very unusual for children to die. i.e. It wasn't something that we expected to happen at all.

It has never been something that is expected, though - it has always been more likely than not that a mother and child would survive childbirth. It has, and always will be, a possibility that death will occur, though. Anyway, I don’t think we actually disagree on much, mrpumblechook, as I don’t think you are one of the people arguing that people were much more sensible in the 1960s and people are making a fuss about nothing with covid 19.

Some people seem to be confusing 1968 with 1868.

THIS!

I asked this same question on here in March i think and i've certainly changed my view.

Flu was a well known illness that we all knew about, it just wasn't feared & many people didn't get this new strain because of immunity from previous strains.
No one has immunity to CV and if it were allowed to run a mock, we don't know what it might mutate into.

Personally i think this is the reason, not that the world has suddenly started to care about the elderly or human life for that matter.