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.

The reaction to the AIDS crisis would tell you that the government / the people of those days would not react with a 'stiff upper lip'.

SARS pretty much remember that vividly (from a professional point of view).

Club 18-30 and Twenties holidays.

Ah. Memories. From the corners of my miiiiiiiind.

@elp30

My older sister reminded me that she went to school, enjoyed the company of her friends and our family's restaurant wasn't closed in 1968 and the Woodstock Festival in NY still had over 60K people attending during a pandemic.

My daughter's friend, born 1999 had emigrated from Hong Kong to the US and remembers she and her entire family having SARS and having to isolate for a week once they arrived. She said that her parents had a "flu" and that was pretty much it. No one really mentioned it.

overall UK deaths were much lower though -20-30k

we have already had more than double the deaths since March with all the mitigations and we still have Jan and Feb to come, with more covid patients in hospital than at the April peak.

You can tell a lot of people on this thread weren't born in the 1980s. I graduated in 1980, got married in 1981, qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 1983. A lot of you are making it sound like the 1950s or before in terms of travel and women working.

I think the biggest difference between now and then is that most of the people dying from it now would not have still been alive to catch it. So if it had happened then I believe the death rate would have been a lot lower. And there was less obesity to further lessen the impact.

My grandad was telling me there was a diphtheria outbreak and 4 children died in his village.

@countrygirl99

Any thread that involves discussion about life in the UK more than about 30 years ago is usually dominated by people who were either not born yet, or were too young to properly remember it, and they very authoritatively start describing the kind of lifestyle they have seen in YouTube clips from 1950s small town America.

It's really weird.

@PastMyBestBeforeDate

We are heading towards that total of deaths WITH lockdown and modern treatments Yes people stayed local and didn't travel so much but men (mostly) would have needed to go out to work Agree that more women would have been home for school closures. Oil crisis shutting schools for example. And hospitals were very different in staffing and expectations. Ambulance staff were transport rather than medics.

Sorry to be so crude. But that is because 40/50 years ago the majority of people, who’ve died of coronavirus would already be dead. Life expectancy in 1970 was 71/72. Today it is 81.

@StopSquirtingBleachOnCaneToads someone the ideas people have about relatively recent history are wierd aren't they.

My dad caught the Asian flu in the 1960s and was ill for a week ( before I was born)
His doctor did a home visit and he told him then that the airplane would carry more virus far and wide. Seems his words came true.
Having our own technology at home has helped a lot : back then people couldn't or didn't work from home of course. The doctor used to write it all the notes down by hand.
I dread to think what would have happened plus sanitation and hand gel etc wasn't as good : lucky to have a bar of soap around.
I suppose there were more hospitals and less population back then : smaller state.

An interesting question is whether the UK could have afforded the costs of furlough/lost tax revenue then - would a UK government in the 1970s have been able to borrow as it has done this year, to finance it?

And following on from that, if it couldn't have furloughed would a UK govt have been prepared to have so many businesses close temporarily? Especially as, as op says, wfh would not have been possible for as many people, as effectively. (not totally impossible for all - though would have involved collecting and taking files home rather than zoom!)

What a shame these more resilient, calm, ‘boots on the ground’ (😂) generations did such a shitty job of raising their kids.

As I assume you’re suggesting if you seriously think qualities like resilience have disappeared.

I remember being in bed very ill with Asian flu when I was a child, I have a clear memory of waking up and asking for ice cream and my mother leaving me in the house alone to go to the local shop to buy some. I don’t recall knowing about it beforehand, unlike school children today.

That was just over 50 years ago.

lucky to have a bar of soap around.

Soap has been around for some time (see: 19th century adverts for the stuff) and was quite the thing in the 1980s. Heck, we even had shower gel.

Agree with PP. By 1980, most women worked; overseas travel was quite a normal thing to do (I lived in a tourist town that attracted 100s of 1000s of foreign visitors a year, and people travelled in the other direction too); hospitals were not more plentiful and better funded, in fact the newly elected Tory government made a big point of cutting the NHS budget and closing hospitals. And see the panic over AIDS as an example of how people reacted towards a new and untreatable virus.

they very authoritatively start describing the kind of lifestyle they have seen in YouTube clips from 1950s small town America.

Yes, this.

In the 1960s a bar of soap was all you had though!! My parents were quite poor though but mum always had soap around.

@the80sweregreat

In the 1960s a bar of soap was all you had though!! My parents were quite poor though but mum always had soap around.

But you said people were lucky to have soap around as though it was some kind of oddity. Soap was a commonplace thing, both in the 1960s and the 1980s.

Of course things would have been different, and obviously it would have been very much worse.

I was born in 1955 and I honestly don’t remember any pandemic before this one. I did have a very bad bout of flu but that was probably 1990 ish.

I don’t subscribe to the ‘more resilient’ thing...I think you just deal with circumstances as they were at the time. We didn’t have the mass communication so we didn’t have people stirring up panic and most of us were far more worried about nuclear war than a virus.

AIDS was a big thing but I don’t know anyone who really changed their behaviour, more condoms were used for sure but we still ‘celebrated’ our sexual freedom 😊

Now I don’t wish to offend and would make it clear that I am a couple of stone above my fighting weight.........but in the 60s and 70s you didn’t see many fat people. My family never had a car, anywhere local we walked, my school was 3 miles away. Everyone got a lot more exercise because everything was more physical.....even working in an office involved manual filing and running messages...you didn’t ping an email, you walked up 2 floors and spoke to someone.

People weren’t healthier because we also had smog, pollution and a dreadful lack of health and safety but I do think that leaner, more physically active, bodies were better able to deal with infections (imho only).

It would have been different because of the low numbers of women in the workforce, children at primary level walking to school some by themselves, and far fewer winter holidays. However, more people in factory and industrial environments so if it got hold it could spread rapidly there.

A government of able ministers and decisiveness would also have happened, certainly if Mrs Thatcher had been Prime Minister.

Interesting to look at responses to the 1918 pandemic. These included closing schools and places of ‘public amusement’ and even saw mask wearing. There were less closures during 1958 and 68 pandemics but hospitals were less overwhelmed and, in any case, didn’t have the same ITU functions as we have now. There was still some concern about public panic but this blamed on press not social media. However, what it’s worth , I don’t consider any measures to mitigate the spread of viruses like this to be unreasonable and I do think we should learn lessons from the past about the importance of protecting our most vulnerable members of society and the dangers of right wings views that suggest some lives are worth less than others.

Probably wouldn't have spread as fast as we are more interconnected in every way now. Probably would have killed far more.

There is no 'mass hysteria' about covid. There is appropriate concern at a virus that either we have to limit (through lockdowns as we have nothing else right now), treat in enormous numbers (which we don't have the capacity to do) or accept mass appalling deaths (a course which has enormous and unpredictable implications for our society).

Lockdowns are not just about protecting health, they are also about protecting mental health (what will it feel like to live in a society where avoidable deaths are tolerated and with ongoing mass simultaneous bereavement) and protecting society itself (from destabilising impacts of mass illness and death).

I think the term 'hysteria' (notwithstanding the sexist roots of the word) would be more appropriately applied to covid denial. Covid denial/minimisation is based in an inability to cope with the reality imo.

They took quarantine more seriously. I remember three weeks off with scarlet fever.

Well, we'd have had big red crosses painted on our doors as soon someone in the house started coughing, and a daily visit from a man in black robes calling 'Bring out your dead.' Rotten pigeons would have been used as a poultice on the chest.

... oh, sorry. Based on some of the posts above I thought we were talking about the middle ages.

lucky to have a bar of soap around

Yeah, our pet diplodocus kept eating it.

Jesus.