Why does no one talk about the 1989-90 epidemic?

[LinemanForTheCounty]

Found out about this recently - 29000 dead. Looking at the dates I had it and after effects including pleurisy (I was 20, no reason for me to have pleurisy other than this). It affected people under 25 worst.

I dunno. I'm trying to figure this all out but that's a lot of people dead, mostly young people. Did we get it wrong then or have we got it wrong now? Our response, I mean.

@peonypower

You’re comparing apples and pears. The IFR for flu isn’t 0.1%... it’s an approximation for the case fatality rate (CFR) which varies season by season - some years are worse than others. Like Covid, flu is asymptomatic in many, more than 3/4s in a recent U.K. study which would reduce the IFR to 0.025%. However, the 0.26% figure for Covid is a IFR estimate.

So, if that’s true, it’s good news and Covid is less deadly than other estimates that tend to be higher. However, it’s still not similar to the flu and about 10 times as deadly.

The fact that pretty much every public health department of every country in the world has responded so seriously to this should be enough in itself to show that it’s not “just the flu”, unless you believe in some crazy tin-foil hat conspiracy theory that has the USA in league with Iran and Russia!

@hamstersarse

I’m not basing my belief that Ferguson’s prediction was reasonable based on the finer points of this model, still less previous models. It’s neither here or there... I’m basing it on what we’ve seen of Covid’s actual, not modelled, impact where it was been allowed to take root and infect a significant part of the population without any mitigation measures being put in place, and where the outbreak was, at least until things got out of hand, treated similar to the flu. Thankfully there are few examples, as pretty much everywhere has responded by taking action that far exceeds a typical flu outbreak, even if not through Government requirement through public response.

Bergamo is the best example, with 6,000 deaths out of 1.1m (equating to 360,000 deaths if scaled up to the U.K.). NYC is another, whose deaths scale up to 178,000 if scaled up over the U.K.

Both of these places did take drastic action, albeit too late, which doubtless stopped things from being even worse.

Ferguson’s 500,000 was only an estimate in the early days - the take away is that Covid would be likely to lead to 100,000s of deaths if action wasn’t taken. Whatever the issues with the model itself, that estimate has stood the test of time.

Yup. And that’s only looking at the binary dead/recovered statistics. As many thousands of people will attest, not all recoveries are equal & some people are suffering chronic ongoing illness & possible permanent damage to lungs, heart, kidney & brain.
And yes, I know you can get a degree of damage from flu & other viral infections, but by allowing it to spread freely we have left thousands vulnerable to possibly long term debilitating illness. That too will have a cost, both in terms of public health & economic cost.

Well am very surprised as lived and worked in Central London then (aged 27) and didn't notice it!

@LinemanForTheCounty

My goodness thank you for posting this.

I remember having a terrible cough and aches/weakness like I had never experienced before. I remember one day making my way back from college and barely making it home to collapse on my bed. I was young (20s) and thought very little of it. I never really recovered. Not long after that I ended up in hospital with suspected Guillain Barre syndrome and put on a ventilator. I lost use of all four limbs. Chest X-ray showed a shadow on my lung and doctors suspected something sinister and performed a thoracotomy. Nothing was found, other than "black and blue" lung indicating pleurisy.

I won't bore you with the horrendous ill health journey I've had since then. Suffice to say doctors back then had no clue what was wrong with me and I recovered slowly discharged using a wheelchair. To this day I am disabled and I have always believed it was an infection that migrated to my spinal cord.

@seenbeensbean

I worked at a major nhs regional hospital serving a huge area of the country, I was responsible for managing bed numbers. There wasn't a major issue.

Not according to a New York Times article written Dec 24 1989 "British Flu Epidemic Claims Lives and is Forcing Delays in Surgery"

I expect that's because where I worked did emergency surgery which absolutely could not wait.

@hamstersarse

Surely when even Greg Abbott, Governor of Texas, is forced to admit drastic steps are needed to tackle exponentially rising cases, it’s time to take your head out of your sand and stop this ridiculous state of denial that you’re in that Covid is just a bit of flu.

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/06/24/health/us-coronavirus-wednesday/index.html

I remember it -I was in high school and we had an assembly where there were only 60 of us in out of the entire school

They made us carry on with our normal lessons

@sentient oh my word, you poor thing, I'm so sorry to hear about what you've been through. I believe you when you say it's useful information for you but what a terrible situation and awful that doctors didn't know what to do. for you.

This has prompted me to remember when my mum and I had flu around that time. It was just at the end of my primary education. We will so ill. I think it was this.

I also got swine flu in winter 2009 and I’ve had Covid19 too.

I never normally get ill. Perhaps I just get the big ones. Every ten years except 2000!

I was 16 and can't remember this

I was talking about this with my mum the other day, she was a nurse and so remembers a few epidemics that were pretty bad.

I do think some of the difference in response is social. Social media for one thing. But also, people are far more risk adverse now, we have a lot more very elderly people and maybe think about that differently, and we really expect the government to be able to do something about things like this. When my mum was growing up everyone got measles which is a serious disease, polio was around, TB was more common, etc. I think we have been used to feeling very safe, and a little invincible.

@babyroobs me too. A student nurse in Leeds. Wracked my brain- nope don't recall that.

This was a flu. We had it, just like other epidemics of flu. You were ill for some weeks before fully recovering. Corona is a different type of virus with potential long term health damage. The world has shut economies down and sustained long term damage. Flu epidemics were nothing like this. Also, the older and more vulnerable are given a flu vaccine every year.

I found this article written at the time about the 1989/90 flu epidemic.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1371445/

There's some interesting details in there in the context of this thread. The south was least affected and, as Linemanforthecounty pointed out, children were the most affected which fits in with experiences of posters who were at school at the time.

Where I think it is relevant for the current situation is what it says about the impact of sudden increases in demand for health care.

I remember it very clearly, I was 12 and caught it in mid November. I was in bed for about 3 weeks with it and had to miss my grandfather's funeral. I don't really remember anyone else getting it though.

I strongly suspect the difference is a 24 hour news cycle and the active government choice to use the media to scare everyone (which worked so well they're now left with the difficult problem of how to undo it). A bad flu year kills 10s of 1000s of people, and yet people aren't afraid, mostly I suspect because there isn't a daily death count and endless media coverage of it.

This is different to flu but that's not the point I'm trying to make. The point is the psychology aspect.

I never knew about this but I've had the flu only once in my life and it would have been around this time, I was 8 or 9. I still remember the fever hallucinations I had

I remember this, but didn't realise it was classed as significant.

I remember being in school assembly and each morning they'd read out a list of teachers who were off, and if you had any of those teachers that day you had to go to the assembly hall for that period instead.

I remember it. I was at secondary school and loads of people were off ill with it - more than half of my class including myself!

I don't remember it but I was abroad (although my parents and siblings were in the UK). On the other hand, a year later I was studying epidemiology and I don't remember it being discussed even though I had to write an essay on modelling/predicting influenza epidemics/pandemics DS had all my notes/essays for an school project on the SIR model, so it's not that long ago that I last read them!

@FromEden I remember the hallucinations too. Sometimes the less we know the better.

Yes, I remember having that flu during the Christmas holidays. I was sixteen. Out of the five of us at home, three of us were very sick with it. It was during the time that the Ceaucescus were overthrown in Romania. (I think I have that right). I only ever got the flu twice so it stands out for me.

Thank you Lineman. It has been an horrendous journey. Wish I could report back with a happy ending. Thankfully I'm a very resilient person.

Reading your post was timely. I was beginning to reduce my guard against this current virus because of all the doubt being expressed by family members and online (I can think of one highly respected engineer on YT arguing lockdowns have had no impact on the spread of the virus and he has a lot of support from people who think the whole thing is an exaggeration at best or a hoax). I'm not a quick thinker, so couldn't think of a response to de-bunk their theories. Now I don't care whether I'll be accused of being gullible and asleep. I know from direct experience the damage virus' can do, even if you survive them.

Thanks again for posting this. I've trawled through my memory and can confidently say I had that '89 virus. It has been a mystery for over 30 years. It's a real shame the public was not informed at the time. Perhaps the doctor's would have had a better understanding of what they were dealing with.

Stay well Lineman.