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.

Foreign holidays would make no difference. It just takes a bit longer to reach other countries if the masses don't travel.

Little would've been done. Perhaps hand washing advice and isolating the sick, but not much else. There wasn't the ability to mass test the RNA of viruses back then, so you'd be looking at laggy hospital data and even then differentiating between Covid and other viral infections wouldn't be easy.

I'd argue that Government intervention has had little effect on the current Pandemic. The only real difference they can make is closing schools where transmission is high. Seasonality and immunity are the main drivers, just as they are with other airborne viruses.

40-50 years ago there weren't so many vulnerable elderly people. They died in their 70s and weren't kept alive into their 80s and 90s by progressive medicines.

@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.

On the one hand, there was way less air travel - so it would have actually been possible to properly quarantine arrivals.

On the other hand - there would have been less possibility of "working from home" - and less scope for social distancing. More things were done face-to-face.

@AlecTrevelyan006

the 1968 flu pandemic is estimated to have caused around an extra 80,000 deaths in the UK

life carried on pretty much as normal

This is simply not true.

If you read the Lancet article a PP linked to you will see it says in the U.K. there were ‘over 30,000’ deaths in the 1968 pandemic. 20,000 deaths in the U.K. were attributed to the 1957 pandemic. That was from beginning to end,, pwithout severe mitigating measures. We’re currently on more than 70,000 deaths and we’re nowhere near at the end yet - with mitigation.

I agree the media love to whip up a bit hysteria but there is a hell of a lot disinformation out there, especially on social media, spread by people whose agenda it is to play down the severity of the pandemic. It really isn’t comparable to a bad flu year, as a PP has suggested. Again, wild figures get circulated on Facebook and then repeated and repeated as fact. There were not 64,000 flu deaths in the U.K. in 2018. It was a very flu bad year and there were 22,000 flu deaths.

fullfact.org/online/october-2020-flu-covid-pandemic/

40 years ago I was nearly 15 and hated school so any closures would have been welcomed by me (not my mum though) I Would have had to go into school to collect the homework I suppose!
Most of my school friends wouldn't have bothered.
It would have been very boring. No internet or social media or phones.

I'd argue that Government intervention has had little effect on the current Pandemic. The only real difference they can make is closing schools where transmission is high. Seasonality and immunity are the main drivers, just as they are with other airborne viruses.

Yeah right. I suppose Taiwan just got lucky. Nothing to do with "government intervention".

Last week, they had their first locally-transmitted case of COVID since April. None for 255 days prior to this. Just seasonality and immunity? Or the most effective governmental response to COVID in the world?

UK has now has 10 times more new cases in ONE MINUTE - than Taiwan has in over 8 months.

I'm in hoots about the vision some people have of the 70's and 80's. As a student I had a cleaning job in a hospital. One of the wards I worked on was the chest ward and I had to have a heaf test to check my BCG had taken as there were TB patients on the ward. They were in a ward in a main hospital not in an isolation hospital.
Rationing🤣🤣🤣🤣. Although petrol ration books were issued it was never implemented.
Little travel🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 my state school in the 1970s ran annual day trips to France, exchange trips for 3 languages, a ski trip plus possibly music, sport, history trips. Plus we had scout and guide trips to places that included Russia and Morocco. And we knew people who had been all over the world. There was a lot of migration too. The 1970s was when holiday travel for ordinary people really took off. Loads of people did internal or overland to Asia.
Reading some of these posts you would think people scarcely left their village.

@LunaNorth 😂😂😂😂😂

Loads of people did internal or overland to Asia.

Yes. I know people who drove to India.

No mobile phones. I remember going away camping as a teenager and not speaking to my parents on the phone for a week or more.

Modern parents couldn't cope with the "radio silence"!!!

TransplantedScouser Mon 28-Dec-20 23:31:19

• we’ve pushed the boundaries so I can’t cry over 80 year olds dying

We seem to have a generation of people who think living to 90 and people not dying is a given right - it’s not.I would have hoped this would’ve a reality check but all we’ve done is fuck every one else’s lives

The infant mortality rate in 1900 was 165 per thousand births. That's down to 7, so using your argument, we now have a generation who think their baby not dying in its first few months is a given right.

The reduction in infant mortality is also one of the factors in increased life expectancy as it raises the average lifespan.

I’m not sure travel was about being working class ( in terms of money and job type ) as about culturally Northerners not going abroad. The film Shirley Valentine was from Willy Russell’s play written in 1986. Clearly package foreign holidays were well established and easily bought in the high street, even if someone from Liverpool didn’t think it was for them.

Possibly it was just physically more difficult to get to sunny Europe as the south has multiple cross channel ferries to France and Spain, Eurotunnel opened in 1994 ( based in the expanded travel of the 1980’s) and the largest airports.

If you read the ONS stats you’ll see that it’s the type of trip that’s changed as much as who are taking them.
Booze cruises don’t happen as they did back in 80’s but that was very much a thing, but low cost flyers mean more frequent trips but not necessarily family holidays with the kids.

Anyway I do think there would of been a big fuss ( see AID’s), but no furlough, schools would shut but people would have been expected to work.

Some of the comments on here are hilarious

"We also lived in a world where women were just barely entering the workforce." and mention of rationing.

It was 1970's - 80's not the post war years! Primitive times...
One thing that was different was that on the whole in times of crisis people got on and did what they were told. They didn't bleat on about their civil liberties and undermine strategies put in place to help them. In 1976 when there was a drought and water shortages people got on with doing what they'd been told. When there were some supply issues due to the 3 day week people weren't spitting at and attacking the staff in the Co-Op because they could only buy 2 loaves of bread.

Overland to Nepal.....

Great video on it here, inc the tragedies. {Read the comments..}

@TransplantedScouser

We’d have cracked on and got on with it

I was about to say even in the 80s it would have gone down as a bad flu / then I realised it was 40 years ago

I’m 44

Social and 24 hour media has a lot to answer for

Yes some young people have died but I general it kills people with an average (mean, median and mode) over 80 - three score years and ten used to be human life expectancy - we’ve pushed the boundaries so I can’t cry over 80 year olds dying

We seem to have a generation of people who think living to 90 and people not dying is a given right - it’s not.I would have hoped this would’ve a reality check but all we’ve done is fuck every one else’s lives

Do you not have any relatives over 80 that you would cry over if this virus killed them @TransplantedScouser because I certainly would! I will also cry if it kills my friend in her late 40's who is currently on a ventilator in ITU!

In the 1960s there was still rationing

Rationing ended in 1954.

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 grandad spent 9mths in a sanitarium with TB with total isolation from his family. There didn't need to be Facebook to inform anyone, the world was pretty much well aware. Of course the difference then was there was no need for 'scare mongering'... Everyone already knew your chances weren't good.

Some people on this thread need to educate themselves about the past. Working class women have worked for hundreds of years. My mother and her friends all worked when they finished school/college/university in the 60s. Package holidays in the 1970s were as cheap as holidaying in the UK for many and factory workers had been holidaying at the British seaside for decades before then.

There's a docudrama on BBC iPlayer called "The Flu that Killed 50 Million" about the 1918 pandemic. It was made in 2018 and is remarkably prescient. Well worth watching.

I got a job in a solicitors in 1983.

While nearly all the lawyers were men, there was a support staff that was nearly all women secretaries, receptionists, accounts staff and gofers and there were more women working there than men.

40-50 years ago there weren't so many vulnerable elderly people. They died in their 70s and weren't kept alive into their 80s and 90s by progressive medicines.

1971average age of male at death 69
1971 average age of female at death 75.3

1981 average age at death, male 71
1981 average age at death female 77

2018 average age at death for male 79.2
2018 average age at death for female 82.9

I was thinking about the pluses and minuses of covid had been in the early 80s.

The boredom of being stuck at home with three tv channels and no way to keep in touch with your friends save the telephone in the middle of the hall, with calls charged per minute. And no home deliveries of “stuff” . Anyone remember mail order which said, “Allow 21 days for delivery” ? Aargh!

Otoh I think social media is the root of all evil. There were always moaning minnies, but now they have a worldwide megaphone. Just look at MN: some posters drone on and on about their particular niche issue on the coronavirus topics. I think today people in general are much more self-centred. And of course there’s all the scare stuff.

I think the media was more respectful of governments - rightly or wrongly - but what I hate now is this endless searching for the bad news and salivating over gotcha moments. I honestly feel that the media is willing the vaccines to fail .

Lastly I do agree that the preservation of life has become out of hand. If your dm/gm has advanced dementia and is in a care home, it is not a tragedy if they die. I read about someone “enjoying” being able to watch their dm through the care-home window singing nursery rhymes. Wtf? Dh was very distressed to see his battle-axe dm reduced to this, plus a very miserable and long drawn -out death, existing because she could be kept alive.

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.

@inquietant

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.

This in spades.

[quote PlumsAreNotTheOnlyFruit]There is an interesting article about the Asian flu in the 60s here.

www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(2031201-0/fulltext[/quote]
Love this article. Very interesting read.

@Ferrari458

Some of the comments on here are hilarious

"We also lived in a world where women were just barely entering the workforce." and mention of rationing.

It was 1970's - 80's not the post war years! Primitive times...
One thing that was different was that on the whole in times of crisis people got on and did what they were told. They didn't bleat on about their civil liberties and undermine strategies put in place to help them. In 1976 when there was a drought and water shortages people got on with doing what they'd been told. When there were some supply issues due to the 3 day week people weren't spitting at and attacking the staff in the Co-Op because they could only buy 2 loaves of bread.

There's some irony in your post when you consider the protests and strikes that went on in the 1970s!