Did we have this same panic with SARS etc?

[Comps83]

So apparently SARS was a while ago according to DH and the reason I don't remember this sort of panic with it is because it was before social media etc
Feels like it was only a few years ago to me
Did we have this same reaction with SARS and swine flu etc?
I remember with SARS they had monitoring at airports but people who have recently traveled have told me there is nothing in place this time?

There were loads of swine flu threads on here at the time. It's now included in the annual flu vaccine.

Swine Flu and Sars are at two ends of a scale (well kind of MERS/EBOLA stretch further) of being infectious and people dying. Coronavirus hits that perfect mix of being infectious enough to spread and potentially severe enough to cause death/hospital treatment coupled with social media its the perfect storm

I do remember the bird flu panic - I was a PA at the time and had to arrange a remote meeting for all the 'important' people to consider how people could work from home for a while. I do think that social media and irresponsible press are whipping up hysteria and panic this time and making it worse. Time will tell - but I think we will all give thanks and celebrate when the worst has passed.

I remember a lot of panic with Swine Flu as I worked face to face with the public at the time and a colleague died of it. Two others were hospitalised and very ill for a long time afterwards. It felt like I was the only person in the office who didn't get it!

But there wasn't all this stockpiling panic, talk of shutting everywhere down etc. as far as I recall. And we had Tamiflu (had to be collected by a well family member/friend for you, through a hatch in a door at an NHS building!) to help minimise symptoms a bit, which isn't the case with Coronavirus.

Have they said why Tamiflu doesn't do anything with this outbreak?

I asked my mum if she was worried about CV-19 she has underlying health conditions. She told me that there was an outbreak of something in the 70s and no one knew anything about it because no social media, no 24/7 reporting biased one-sided facts. She only knew about it because she was involved in public health nursing. The greatest virus is social media!

@MilkTrayLimeBarrel tamiflu doesn’t work because this is not flu. It’s Coronavirus. Related to SARS and MERS but a lot less deadly. And very infectious. It’s a perfect mix of being not quite deadly enough so people getting it can spread it. But deadly enough to make about 20% aka 1 in 5 needing hospitalisation.

No its not because there is social media panic that it feels worse.

Its because there were only 4 cases of sars in the UK. So it IS worse.

Obviously we all have to look out for our mental health and reading too much late at night about it is a bad idea.

Following advice like sanitising, avoiding crowds is a good idea. Other than that what else can we do?

Social media and constant media updates do make it worse.. realistically we wouldn’t have had 5 updates a day on Wuhan and Italy 10-15 years ago so less panic. The same with U.K. cases we were probably only likely to hear about confirmed cases vs this week we’ve had two “someone in x area has it” posts on Facebook.. neither of them had it, they’d been tested but hadn’t had results back but it turns into a game of Chinese’s whispers.

There’s one confirmed case in our county.. no mention of where could be 70 miles away or more.. but can you buy pasta, bog roll or soap? Hell no! Cancer support services have had to put out an appeal to see if anyone would donate sanitiser for their volunteers and staff visiting patients.

SARS affected only around 8,000 people worldwide, taking 9 months to reach that figure, and killed 774 people.

In just a tiny fraction of that time this coronavirus has infected over 110,000 people and killed over 4,200.

They are not even remotely comparable in terms of seriousness.

Italy alone has had more coronavirus infections and deaths in the last two weeks than the whole world had from SARS in the whole of 2003-4

I had this discussion with a friend about Swine Flu. She said she can't even remember it but I can definitely remember it being a big panic. Schools were closed and people were quarantined and they estimated loads of people would die but it turned out to not be as bad they said it would be. They made a vaccine fairly quickly for it.

I don't remember people panic buying or anything to the extent we're experiencing now. I think social media has a lot to do with that.

I had swine flu and my then 6month old ds got it. It was horrendous, i literally thought I was dying! Then my poor mum and dad caught it as they'd been helping look after me and DS. I don't remember panic buying and stock piling, but maybe I was less aware as I wasn't on Mumsnet lol!! I also don't remember school closures, but thinking about it, it was summer when me and DS caught it so perhaps the schools were already off or because I didn't have school aged children I didn't pay attention!