If this had happened 40-50 years ago...

[Swissrollypoly]

Do you think things would be different? Do you think we’d just have to get on with things as we wouldn’t have the means to work from home or communicate via Zoom or Microsoft teams etc.
Social media didn’t exist, so there wouldn’t be as much panic and scaremongering.
I just wonder how different it would all be, had it happened in another time period.

@Seeline

I was born in 1968. We rarely if ever ate out. My mum didn't work, nor did most of my friends mums. Holidays were a week in the south coast, most of my friends were the same. We didn't have a car or a phone, although that was more unusual. I did O level french. My grammar school offered I level Spanish and German too. No one went on an exchange trip. My first trip abroad was at the age of 21 for a uni field trip. There were 80 of us and half had never been abroad - that was in 1989. None of us were jetting of on 18-30s holidays, although I know they existed. I grew up in a leafy south London suburb.

My grammar school ski trip was in 1970 to the Dolomites. Most of my year went, irrespective of their economic background, Somehow the money was found.

One huge difference between 2020 and 1970/80 is that intensive care units as we understand them now were few and far between and specialist training was only just getting under way (if what I've just read in 2 minutes on Wikipedia is accurate - but it chimes with what I recall of hospitals in the 60s and 70s when I was young).

There would have been no expectation and no capacity to treat huge numbers of people seriously ill with respiratory symptoms by putting them on ventilators. Some would have been put on ventilators, which I assume were less effective than now as it was still a very novel technology. Most would have been nursed on an ordinary ward. Some would have pulled through, with or without long-term damage to health, many would have died.

It's different now. We know what can be done and we expect it will be done, for just about everybody. The trouble is that the most effective therapies take a long time and are very expensive. If demand outstrips supply, who gets treated?

Yes, yes 1979 the medieval year that Ridley Scott's Alien movie was released (acted out on a white hung up sheet with paper cutouts on sticks) 😂

In the 70s and 80s?

In the 70s, compared with now, definitely. Remember that's a population where the adults did live through depression, war, and rationing. Those of us who remember the 70s were mostly teenagers so what we remember is the increasing comfort and freedom, and the sex, drugs, rock, and roll.

80s, I agree with you.

Why are people being so unpleasant? I was writing about what I remembered , my perceptions. We have not been given a precise date, the question was about how the pandemic would have been played out 50 years ago .

I grow up with parents who had suffered the privations and trauma of WW2, this impacted their attitudes and life was simpler , more regimented and less focused on consumerism. That was my experience.

Again, please could everyone spouting historical nonsense pontificating, please post their year of birth so we know if you were actually, you know, there.

1953

Schools would have shut but it would still have been a big deal. Kids still did exams back then! I’d have been in bits if this had happened in my exam years. School was my life!

@Hardbackwriter

I don't think people had such a sense of individual rights and self-expression.

In the 1970s and 80s?!

Of course there were a lot of countercultural and human rights movements, but I also think the majority of the population was much more conformist than today. In some ways it was more bullying, less respectful of individuals. So e.g. I can remember things like people smoking in the no smoking carriages on trains and being confronted by other passengers who were willing to enforce rules in a way that I don't think happens now. People had less confidence in their own rights, even if they believed in the concept. Women, for example, were bullied and abused and people turned a blind eye. I think that happens less today because people there's more of a sense of what our rights are and also less pressure to conform. Maybe less of a sense of social cohesion, so it matters less if people aren't conforming.

@Nanny0gg

Again, please could everyone spouting historical nonsense pontificating, please post their year of birth so we know if you were actually, you know, there.

1953

1973

@Nanny0gg

Again, please could everyone spouting historical nonsense pontificating, please post their year of birth so we know if you were actually, you know, there.

1953

1961

@ciderfromalemon

Does anyone else hear ‘40 years ago’ and automatically think 1960? Then realise it’s actually 1980?

Yep, even though I was born in 1980

@wowfudge

Exchange trips were largely brought in by EU membership and town twinning initiatives which provided some funding for them. Prior to that it would have been down to the links individual schools had and more likely to be grammar or private schools that had those links, though not exclusively.

Possibly but teachers generally in the 80’s loved a school trip. Less health and safety paperwork and often a drink in the bar whilst the kids did their own thing.

People traveled much less 40-50 years ago We also lived in a world where women were just barely entering the workforce.

You need to adjust your timescales somewhat. Package holidays boomed in the 60s, growing up at that time, most folk went abroad for holidays, and most mums of my friends worked.

My biggest memory of 1970 TV was the adverts after Christmas

teletext and cefax for getting great bargain holidays in the early 1980s

@Nanny0gg

Again, please could everyone spouting historical nonsense pontificating, please post their year of birth so we know if you were actually, you know, there.

1953

1954. I was definitely there, and astonished at the nonsense spouted here. My DD born 1975 is laughing at some of the posts.

More people would have just lost their jobs instead of being furloughed and more people would have died.

@Polkadotties

Don’t even need to go back that far. I think had this happened 15 years ago it would have just been chalked up as a ‘bad flu year’.

When SARS took hold in 2003? borders were closed. Travel was restricted to and from Asia. Australia, NZ, Canada and the US had restrictions. I',m not sure about the UK as i was living in Hong Kong at the time but it was not ignored and people did not go about like 'normal'. People wore masks. SOme people kept their children off school.Ex-pats left Asia. Business travel was curtailed as people in Australia/NZ/Canada etc did not want people who had been in or even travelled through Asia in their offices.

forgot this silly advert!

Think plainviola is right that

There was also much less awareness of mental health, so probably the mental health crisis wouldn't have been seen as such. There was a lot of shame attached to MH and insensitivity in attitudes, so I think there would have been many people suffering silently with depression, anxiety, etc.

Many mental health problems would simply have been invisible and people would have suffered without help, and suffered more because of the stigma. On the other hand, I think we overdiagnose mental health problems now so people might have coped better in general.

this was my favourite

I was born in the 60s and I don't think people would have been just "getting on with it at all". Schools would almost certainly have shut mothers would have been expected to look after their children. Not so many women worked in those days anyway so it wouldn't have had a particularly huge economic impact. There weren't so many restaurants and pubs and those that were available would have probably been shut. The governments of the time probably wouldn't have cared much about those workers losing their jobs, particularly as many would have been women. Any unemployed men would have been able to take the place of women working in other industries. Factory workers would have to go to work and probably many would die but their bosses would have been much safer in their offices. Basically the poor would get much poorer, and the rich wouldn't be as much affected.

There was also much less awareness of mental health, so probably the mental health crisis wouldn't have been seen as such. There was a lot of shame attached to MH and insensitivity in attitudes, so I think there would have been many people suffering silently with depression, anxiety, etc.

I agree. Mental health would be the last of anyone's concerns. Anyone upset about being isolated or jobless would be expected to toughen up.

I grew up in the 1960s and this is the first I have heard of the 1968 virus.

As a family we were slightly unusual where we lived as we had a car (one of only three in the street) and a telephone (used by neighbours in an emergency). We also travelled abroad which was very unusual at the time.

There was a lot of social mixing, both among adults and children. Soap and other cleaning products were readily available, as was food. Fat children were rare and different enough to be mercilessly teased.

The 1970s were different. Most people had at least one car, a phone and a television. Holidays abroad started to become more common.

The 1980s weren't much different to now, just no internet and more phone boxes.

This might be a bit of a class thing - and indeed money-related.

I had “regimented meals” all through the 70s (and indeed 80s) as did dh and a lot of my friends. It was roast beef on Sunday, cold meat on Monday, sausages on Tuesday, chops Wednesday, casserole (stew) Thursday and then, horror of horrors, bloaters on Friday. Saturday was a high tea (bread and butter etc).

We never went on a foreign holiday. I never went on a school trip abroad. I did have a friend though who ate spaghetti bolognese , went to Majorca and lived in a plate-glass house with wicker chairs. And her mum had a car!!!!!!! The glamour !

@Belladonna12

I was born in the 60s and I don't think people would have been just "getting on with it at all". Schools would almost certainly have shut mothers would have been expected to look after their children. Not so many women worked in those days anyway so it wouldn't have had a particularly huge economic impact. There weren't so many restaurants and pubs and those that were available would have probably been shut. The governments of the time probably wouldn't have cared much about those workers losing their jobs, particularly as many would have been women. Any unemployed men would have been able to take the place of women working in other industries. Factory workers would have to go to work and probably many would die but their bosses would have been much safer in their offices. Basically the poor would get much poorer, and the rich wouldn't be as much affected.

Um. There were pubs on just about every corner (slightl exaggeration) plus cafes, coffee bars, Wimpeys and yes, restaurants.

And can we please dispel the myth that women didn't work!