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.

We would have been spared having Boris and his idiots in charge, so we might have had some decent government decisions. sigh

regarding social media: There are parts of the world (particularly refuge camps) where people have barely any access to the internet at all.The level of fear/false rumours and scare mongering around covid is of the scale in those places. So I think it is wrong to assume that without social media people would be completely chilled.

@LunaNorth

lucky to have a bar of soap around

Yeah, our pet diplodocus kept eating it.

Jesus.

😂😂😂

Is that why soap on a rope was invented?

I'm sure there were probably as many minimising idiots then as we see on MN today.

The stupid are always with us. The problem is people listen to their nonsense.

50 years ago we had what were called fever hospitals for things like TB & other conditions, they were built away from city & town centres usually in countryside where patients were sent for long term care that included fresh air to help patients recover, patient's beds were regularly wheeled out on balconies & areas outside to get sunlight & fresh air to aid recovery. In reality it is what is needed now, they were also used as quarantine areas to contain infectious diseases like polio, scarlet fever etc.

Yeah, our pet diplodocus kept eating it.

Here's an artist's impression of Coronavirus patients in the 1970s.

@TW2013

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

The regulations have been set by the government, not people on social media.

They really wouldn’t bother with all of this if the only downside of COVID were a few old people dying slightly earlier.

I was in South China during SARS and it was nothing like this. SARS was nowhere near as infectious as Covid. More deadly yes but no one I knew had SARS or even knew anyone who had SARS and nothing needed to close. If you were asymptomatic you didn't transmit SARS as well so much easier to avoid.

SantasBritchesSpelleas 😂😂

Sorry - didn’t finish post.

I agree that quarantine was taken more seriously and I think people are underestimating the disruption caused by infectious diseases in the past.

Always quite fancied being one of those people with a bell shouting bring out your dead.

Blimey my mum was certainly working in the 70s/80s and we went abroad on holiday and, and we had soap!

As I only know 4 people who’ve had Covid, all of whom had what they described as very mild flu, if this had happened 40 years ago it probably wouldn’t even have registered anything untoward was going on.

As a child in the 70s and 80s, there was no social media, but advertising/media still had some pretty strong scare tactics, so I'm not sure how relaxed Govt would be(those of us from that era will remember the dramatic public information adverts too, regarding electricity pylons, deep water, train tracks, level crossings etc) .

The tombstone advert for AIDS and Where the Wind Blows cartoon were very powerful, for example. I remember my aunt saying that if they did drop the bomb, she hoped it would be on her house directly. It terrified me.

My husband remembers being sent to a sanitorium when he was unwell. Away from his family for weeks. This was in the 60's.

I remember my Mum being fearful of us catching whooping cough in the 70's. Classmates were in hospitals for months.

Our health care system simply doesn't have the capacity for this sort of care anymore.

I don't think people were more resillient, I remember my Mum and her friends having endless conversations about their 'nerves'. The GP would prescribe tranquilisers but my mum and her mates were suspicious of them, preferring chain smoking to keep them calm.

I think school may have shut if there'd been corona. We had outdoor loos and no hot water. Schools were not held to ransome by league tables or ofsted and we'd probably have been set project style learning.

Most mums were at home and it was acceptable to leave fairly young children at home for several hours.

I remember two of my grandparents died of pneumonia in their sixties and this was considered a goodish age. No one felt more should have beedone for them

Local gossip managed to stir people into a frenzy before social media. You only really knew what happened in your area though.

@PlumsAreNotTheOnlyFruit

"That said it doesn't sound to me quite as dangerous as covid"

If it caused 80,000 deaths (estimated) then based on a population of 50 million in the U.K. then it was worse than Covid currently.

Probably find in fact more died as they would be put down as other things. What skewed things in the U.K. in the early part of the Covid pandemic was the ridiculous certifying of people having died from Covid when they never had any symptoms or a positive test, just to enable fast tract death certification. What I'm unsure about is whether these deaths have subsequently been removed from the overall figures as I understand Matt Hancock went ballistic when it became clear about the widespread stupidity of death counts and which lead death within 28 days measure which was the norm elsewhere

In the 1970s I lived in a very rural area of England. One of my elderly neighbours had never travelled beyond the county boundary. Yet my state primary ran a Mediterranean cruise including countries such as Egypt which would be less likely to happen now. I went on two french exchanges in the 1980s the latter one being by plane and there were things like school ski trips and people went on package holidays to Greece or Self drive Eurocamp. I’d say city breaks were less common due to flights being comparatively more expensive than they are now and also Eastern Europe not being easy to travel to before the Berlin Wall came down. I think that the significant difference is that the population was a lot lower and the motorway network was less extensive so people would not have travelled outside their area as much apart from on holiday or to work or visit relatives. There were definitely far fewer lorries on the roads as more freight was carried by rail. Computers did not come in until the 80s and the internet in the 90s so the technology we have now would have been unimaginable. I am not sure of the answer to the op but this post is merely to describe what travel was like from my perspective in the 70s/80s

Very good point...without this being fuelled by the media we would have just got on with life...

50 years ago we had what were called fever hospitals for things like TB & other conditions, they were built away from city & town centres usually in countryside where patients were sent for long term care that included fresh air to help patients recover, patient's beds were regularly wheeled out on balconies & areas outside to get sunlight & fresh air to aid recovery. In reality it is what is needed now, they were also used as quarantine areas to contain infectious diseases like polio, scarlet fever etc.

No we did not!!!!! I was born in 1971 and, during my childhood, quarantining and those diseases were things of the past. A quick Google has just told me quarantine hospitals were wound down following the NHS starting in 1948 and none existed by 1968.

It’s not fuelled by media. Regulations have been set by a government that would really, really prefer people just got on with life.

Friends dh had an ambulance out last night
He is under 50 so I do believe this is more serious than flu tho I accept flu can take anyone and I'm not minimising the past epidemics.

I suspect that it's a very 21st century thing to complain that we're taking precautions against a disease that kills people. I wonder if television/movies have made us see the world as fantasy. Where the actors go home after being killed on set. People who think we're making too much fuss would scream and whine if they themselves were sick because then it would be real and not just another episode of a soap opera.

I sometimes wonder if something happened to our ability to process new information too. Look at how many people point to deaths and say something like "that's not that much worse than so why bother with masks lockdowns etc"

They must have had it explained to them 100s of times that these are the deaths we got after we reduced the numbers with masks & lockdowns. Yet the next day they have no memory of this and repeat the same old tired misconceptions.

I suppose really they existed, but didn't have a voice.

In the 1960s there was still rationing.

In the 1970s there was the 3 day week and considerable other shortages/disruption in the run up to the UK needing an international financial bail out (I remember doing homework by oil lamp), so people were used to coping when a particular sector wasn't working.

I think there was considerably more stoicism.

I was born in the 70s. Most of my friends' mums were at home and most of us didn't go on abroad holidays until the late 80s.

We did have one car and didn't eat our weekly, my parents didn't have the money!

@Dongdingdong

FFS if any of you had set foot in a hospital in the last few weeks you'd see it was nothing like a "bad flu year."

So we keep hearing. The reaction to this so called “deadly virus” is the biggest act of mass hysteria that we have seen in our lifetime.

Are you a health earner? If nor, do you know any? Spoken to one?

I am glad some PPs are aware that 40 years ago was the 1980s! "Feeding family and surviving" was mentioned by a PP, ffs! This wasn't 140 yeas ago, we had package holidays, we travelled around the UK on day trips, went to pubs, restaurants and high street cafes frequently. And just like now, some people paid attention to laws and rules, some didn't.

I think there is a huge problem with people holding up the past to what we should aspire to now and how people got on with things and were sensible and stoic. Mental illness was still there but was ignored or literally locked away. People were still human and reacted to events and fear, stress, depression, anxiety were all present.