Would Covid-19 have been detected 30+ years ago?

[DollyStardust]

Do you think if Covid 19 had hit 30 years ago it would have been detected? Or would people have thought it was a flu? Wondering what the technology that detected it actually came to exist!

@DollyStardust

Perhaps my OP wasn't as clear as it could be, I'm finding it hard to explain myself now! Just wondering what are the chances we had undetected pandemics or pandemics that were found much later and at what point historically, Covid 19 could have been missed.

I get what you're saying, but the 1918 flu pandemic was identified as a flu pandemic.

We would definitely have spotted people being seriously ill with Covid. It isn't a cold.

There was way less travel from China in the 90's also so it would not have spread as quickly or as widespread as it did.

I think we've always know the common cold could cause a pandemic - wasn't that what wiped out lots of native American tribes after their first contact with Europeans?

Just over thirty years ago Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister.

Imagine how much better the response to a pandemic would have been then. I disagreed with almost all of her policies, but know that probably none of the current government would be fit to be in a cabinet of hers.

Primary schools in Germany today are very like primary schools in the UK in the 80s and 90s. The teachers actually walked around to the children's houses and hand posted packets of work here, and then the parents hand delivered them back to the schools. Email is pretty much unheard of, the classrooms still have overhead projectors and chalk boards. The OHPs are ancient and held together with duct tape.

@llansannan11

Just over thirty years ago Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister.

Imagine how much better the response to a pandemic would have been then. I disagreed with almost all of her policies, but know that probably none of the current government would be fit to be in a cabinet of hers.

She'd probably have just told us all to buckle up and battle through.... it would have been carnage!

@InCahootswithOrwell

Why would lockdowns not have happened without the internet? It’s been used as a strategy for controlling epidemic and pandemic outbreaks of various infectious diseases.

The only reason the U.K. had as few restrictions as is did during the 1918 pandemic was that the government didn’t want to damage the war effort.

Entertainment etc could have been closed, but very few jobs could have been done remotely... Office jobs would have had to have been done in the office...not via a laptop at home.

Yes not sure if we'd been better or worse under Thatcher!

It was first noticed in Wuhan because of the large numbers of patients coming into hospital with a pneumonia of unknown origin. From googling, I think I'm right in remembering it doesn't look like 'normal' pneumonia by X ray, it looks very different. They had X rays 30 years ago so assume they'd have got as far as the unknown origin bit just as quickly, they wouldn't have assumed it was the flu.

There would have been less conflicting sources of misinformation.

Yes, I think it is quite distinctive on X-rays (ground glass opacities or something like that). Remember, the original hospital doctors in China noticed it first, without the benefit of social media or the news telling them about it. It was an unusual pattern of hospitalisations, with unusual X-rays. That experience would have been repeated all over the world as covid reached new countries and caused unusual hospitalisations - even if the news of it was delivered other than via 24hr tv, and even if covid had travelled more slowly due to there being less international travel.

Even if the news of what the doctors were seeing was delivered to the general population in different ways, I mean. The doctors wouldn't need to hear about it first in order to notice it, they'd simply see patterns of illness changing locally.

@DollyStardust

Gosh I was alive 30 years ago, I'm not suggesting it was the dark ages but communication wasn't so instant and people were less in touch with each other generally (i.e.I used to phone and write to family in Canada, now I can message them anytime I want for free!). Up until recently, if no-one ever reffered to Covid as anything other than a cold, me, as a member of the public would have thought nothing of it based on the people I know of having it or evading it. So could the NHS have initially thought we had a flu epidemic and not have even thought to look for Covid?!

I'm thinking of the UK in isolation and without the China warning we had.

I remember growing up heating about nhs preparing for a bad flu winter etc. And just trying to gauge at what point historically could one of those flus have been an undetected pandemic?!

You actually make an excellent point about Flu like epidemics and the fact that 30 Years ago they were an accepted part of life.

Pretty much bang on 30 Years Ago I can recall being completely floored with the worst flu I ever had. It was a very bad flu season. The local undertakers had a freezer trailer from a truck to store bodies.

The flu was pretty much widespread around the world. I imagine it probably took slightly longer to spread due to less travel.

I don't recall any of us doing anything different than getting on with our lives.

I don't think it would have spread so far & wide 30 years ago due to less international travel.

There was less pressure on schools to show data & have fabulous results. So I think there would have been a different kind of stress on young people.

The internet has helped but has also created instant news so we feel like we need to know all the time what is happening all over. It's also enabled anti vax propaganda and nonsense about 5G etc to be circulated freely.

@converseandjeans

I don't think it would have spread so far & wide 30 years ago due to less international travel.

There was less pressure on schools to show data & have fabulous results. So I think there would have been a different kind of stress on young people.

The internet has helped but has also created instant news so we feel like we need to know all the time what is happening all over. It's also enabled anti vax propaganda and nonsense about 5G etc to be circulated freely.

To reply to your last paragraph. The internet has also allowed the population to scared witless; about a virus which really does not mean a death sentence or long hospital stays for the majority of the population.

I wont argue pro or anti re vaccinations, however there is nothing at all wrong with questioning the evicence.

The so-called Russian flu of 1890 was probably a coronavirus pandemic. The virus that caused it is still here, by the way--it causes common colds.

People did notice that something was going on in 1890, which is why they gave it a name (Russian flu). That said, I think it's fair to say that a) people panicked less about disease when there was a lot more of it around anyway b) in the past, people did mostly just accept that if you were over 70, at some point you'd die of a bad chest in the winter or something c) full lockdowns were not really possible because most jobs could not be done from home.

I do think you’re right about illness and disease generally over the last 70 years or so.
When my parents (currently 75) were children, illness and even death was a much more widespread part of childhood. Those “childhood” diseases were rife, including really serious ones like measles and unusual but serious bacterial infections like epiglotitis. Now Doctors can go an entire career in the U.K. without seeing these kind of infections any more.
We’ve become used to being generally well, we have only been vaccinating against flu for around 20/25 years I believe, before that, pneumonia, bronchitis and the flu were expected to wipe out swathes of older people every year. We’ve also become very used to people living well into their 80s and beyond whereas until quite recently even living to 80 was thought of as a good age. My mid 70s parents are living basically the same life as they did in their 50s, as are all their friends, they’re not “old” like people in their 70s used to be, and therefore diseases that are primarily affecting the elderly aren’t tolerated any more as the “old” aren’t really “old”!

It would have spread slower but hospitals would have become aware and spoken to each other. Even if it meant using a phone with a spinny dial.

China tried to cover covid up and stamp it out but it was too late.

Doctors in Paris treated someone I'm sure it was pre Christmas 2019, who had an flu like illness but tested negative for flu. They later tested positive for covid.

Would we have had lockdowns? Schools would likely have closed probably more mums / Grannies / neighbours were "housewives" so able to care for children at home.
Kids would have brought text books home.

Entertainment / leisure would have closed.

WFH probably not although it might have been more collect files and work at home if at all possible.

When there was more disease about, people did still try to avoid it. They accepted the need for certain limitations on what could be done because of circulating disease. Parents stopped their children from swimming to avoid polio. Diseases like measles and mumps led to children being kept in isolation away from other children, perhaps not being able to go back to school if they might be incubating it.

The idea that a sensible attitude to disease means not ever having to think about it or have our daily life affected in any way by public health measures seems to me to be very much a luxury belief borne of a period in this country when there hasn't been anything new and worrying in general circulation. (Just like antibiotics have let us be more relaxed and less fearful of infections.)

I think people mostly do accept that we're all more vulnerable and likely to die of even common illnesses when we're elderly. If covid had genuinely only killed very elderly people, or killed people by making them drop dead instantly, it would probably be pretty much allowed to get on and do its thing. The problem is that it isn't that neat and tidy. Even if society as a whole said "you know what, if a person over 70 dies of covid, it's no big deal, we won't try to stop it happening", that doesn't really remove the requirement to at least try some basic treatment or keep them comfortable, does it? And if there are lots of them being ill at once, that's a problem. Likewise middle aged and younger people - a much smaller percentage of them might become seriously ill and need care, but if enough people are infected, that can still be a lot of people.

Very frail people not being resuscitated, or no one but a few of the strongest people and pregnant women getting ECMO treatment, is already happening. That's easy. But turning all 70 year olds away from hospitals and saying "sorry, you're too old, you can't have oxygen for a couple of days even though it's all you might need" would be something else altogether. Deciding in the abstract that older people have had a good innings is quite a different thing from implementing a policy that says they get no care at all, and it's something like that that you'd have to implement if you wanted to make high rates of covid manageable. Even without going into the ethics of it (which are grim), it would be very horrible to put into practice.

On top of that, there's the fact that covid seems to be a weird new vascular disease that greatly increases the risk of death after routine surgery, and is dangerous in pregnant women. Dealing with that isn't helped by having a more 'realistic' attitude to elderly people dying, either. The only way to protect people of all ages from those types of covid risks is to have lower levels of it circulating - so then we're back to reacting to it and not having the luxury of ignoring it, even though it's mild in most people.

People wouldnt have lost their jobs if they didnt comply to a vaccine mandate.

Viruses were ‘discovered’ in 1892, as they reinfected a plant with a solution which had been filtered for bacteria. They thus knew a much smaller infectious particle existed, which they termed a virus.

Viruses were first seen when the electron microscope was invented, in the 1930s.

So, 30 years ago would not have been an issue.

However, it might have been around the worst time for it to have happened. There was already international travel, modern (screen based) financial markets and open plan offices, yet no effective internet.

I think we would just have accepted a lot more deaths and got through it quicker. Would have been pretty grim.

I think you're underestimating clinical decision making. Doctors would have identified that this was a disease that didn't behave as expected almost from the start. There were chest xrays published as 'typical of this new disease' very early on, and even when the testing was much less developed patients were being clinically diagnosed and isolated.

There was already international travel, modern (screen based) financial markets and open plan offices, yet no effective internet.

But nearly everyone had access to television and watched the same programmes. There would be more factual reporting and fewer soundbites and opinion.

@Enb76,

Agree with that.

But lockdown would have been impossible financially at that point in time.

Too sophisticated to go back to basics, no internet for work from home.

There wouldn’t have been a vaccine. As a population, I think we would have had to live with it, maybe with initial lockdowns then realised the futility.

Bearing in mind the Tiananmen square massacre happened in 1989, I think China would have got a grip on it easier as the country would have been freer to use much more draconian methods; potentially including measures, which led to all the infected dying.

It depends which country it started in and perhaps it would not have spread widely until it reached a milder form.