How would we have dealt with covid in the early nineties?

[Cheeseandlobster]

I genuinely dont know. With the absence of the internet what would we have done? Especially during the first lockdown when schools were closed with no option of online teaching. Things are bad enough now. I lived in a home with abusive toxic parents. Seeing my friends was my salvation. I genuinely would not have coped with what today's teenagers have to deal with.

We would have done exactly as we did with flu pandemics, and got on with it.

Lockdowns are only possible because of the internet. Partly because it makes shopping and education possible (the latter a poor substitute for the real thing, but still). Partly because it allows people to disseminate crap that makes other people feel more anxious than they would do, had they no access to the endless drip of online media.

I wish we were back in the early 90s.

I think we would have had to "get on with it" to some extent esp as WFH wasn't really possible even for office workers. But perhaps still a closure of hospitality and rules about staying within your local area.

Honestly? I don’t believe anything would have happened. We would maybe be aware of this new illness going about but we wouldn’t hear about it constantly or have hysterical people on Facebook. I don’t think there would have been lockdowns either

We would have just carried on! NHS would have been a shit show but it wasn’t maxed out as much then

I'd be interested to know if medical options were as advanced as they are now. Would we have been in a position to ventilate/treat in ICUs to the same degree as we do now? I suspect the issue of hospital capacity would have been different because we wouldn't have been able to treat so many people with such advanced symptoms. So perhaps lockdown wouldn't have been so critical. But I'm not an expert.

Nothing would have happened. We would have got on with life as normal and there'd be some stories in the newspapers about a bad flu going around.

The current response is only possible because people are on their phones/ipads etc 24/7 and so we have non stop fear mongering and propaganda on a global level. This couldn't have happened in the nineties or even the zeroes when people still had sense.

People who don't live as much in the real world, don't have any sense of perspective. That's too many people nowadays.

If people from 20 or 30 years ago could come straight from that time into now, they'd wonder they were in an snl or Monty python sketch. If you explained to them that we shut everything down, mandating masks and banning families from seeing each other, for a virus that has a 0.1 - 0.5% death rate depending on region, mostly over eighties, they'd think we were brainwashed into hysteria.

@ReneeRol

Nothing would have happened. We would have got on with life as normal and there'd be some stories in the newspapers about a bad flu going around.

The current response is only possible because people are on their phones/ipads etc 24/7 and so we have non stop fear mongering and propaganda on a global level. This couldn't have happened in the nineties or even the zeroes when people still had sense.

People who don't live as much in the real world, don't have any sense of perspective. That's too many people nowadays.

If people from 20 or 30 years ago could come straight from that time into now, they'd wonder they were in an snl or Monty python sketch. If you explained to them that we shut everything down, mandating masks and banning families from seeing each other, for a virus that has a 0.1 - 0.5% death rate depending on region, mostly over eighties, they'd think we were brainwashed into hysteria.

Maybe. Or if you gave a fuller picture including NHS bed and staffing capacity for that 0.5% it might make more sense.

Their response would be to provide more beds. That would be the common sense approach... Which the government had plenty of time to do but didn't.

We would have had a scary campaign with icebergs etc like we did in the eighties for HIV.

We'd have got on with it. End. Of.

This is really interesting. We would have more compliance with any health issues. It was before social media, before the Andrew Wakefield vaccine scandal, before "Fake News".
People would have done what they were instructed to do.
It was a time before cheap EasyJet style airlines so there wasn't as much foreign travel allowing it to spread.
We would have had HIV style television telethons. Universities and schools would have reduced contact time and simply sent us home with piles and piles of textbooks.
We would not have been able to work from home per se, but certain large industries such as IT/banking etc would not have been as extensive.
I think we would have managed. We would have been very bored though

I was 21 on 1981 @phantomish. People were not more compliant and actually were far less boring and bored because they had to actively seek out information. It was less instant admittedly but people were still travelling widely.