This is the global curve, but the US curve is similar.
Posted on 05/02/2020 6:39:16 AM PDT by budj
In my lifetime, there was another deadly flu epidemic in the United States. The flu spread from Hong Kong to the United States, arriving December 1968 and peaking a year later. It ultimately killed 100,000 people in the U.S., mostly over the age of 65, and one million worldwide.
Lifespan in the US in those days was 70 whereas it is 78 today. Population was 200 million as compared with 328 million today. If it would be possible to extrapolate the death data based on population and demographics, we might be looking at a quarter million deaths today from this virus. So in terms of lethality, it was as deadly and scary as COVID-19 if not more so, though we shall have to wait to see.
“In 1968,” says Nathaniel L. Moir in National Interest, “the H3N2 pandemic killed more individuals in the U.S. than the combined total number of American fatalities during both the Vietnam and Korean Wars.”
And this happened in the lifetimes of every American over 52 years of age.
I was 5 years old and have no memory of this at all. My mother vaguely remembers being careful and washing surfaces, and encouraging her mom and dad to be careful. Otherwise, it’s mostly forgotten today. Why is that?
Nothing closed. Schools stayed open. All businesses did too. You could go to the movies. You could go to bars and restaurants. John Fund has a friend who reports having attended a Grateful Dead concert. In fact, people have no memory or awareness that the famous Woodstock concert of August 1969 actually occurred during a deadly American flu pandemic that only peaked six months later.
Stock markets didn’t crash. Congress passed no legislation. The Federal Reserve did nothing. Not a single governor acted to enforce social distancing, curve flattening (even though hundreds of thousands of people were hospitalized), or banning of crowds. No mothers were arrested for taking their kids to other homes. No surfers were arrested. No daycares were shut even though there were more infant deaths with this virus than the one we are experiencing now. There were no suicides, no unemployment, no drug overdoses.
Media covered the pandemic but it never became a big issue.
As Bojan Pancevski in the Wall Street Journal points out, “In 1968-70, news outlets devoted cursory attention to the virus while training their lenses on other events such as the moon landing and the Vietnam War, and the cultural upheaval of the civil-rights movements, student protests and the sexual revolution.”
The only actions governments took was to collect data, watch and wait, encourage testing and vaccines, and so on. The medical community took the primary responsibility for disease mitigation, as one might expect. It was widely assumed that diseases require medical not political responses.
It’s not as if we had governments unwilling to intervene in other matters. We had the Vietnam War, social welfare, public housing, urban renewal, and the rise of Medicare and Medicaid. We had a president swearing to cure all poverty, illiteracy, and disease. Government was as intrusive as it had ever been in history. But for some reason, there was no thought given to shutdowns.
Which raises the question: why was this different? We will be trying to figure this one out for decades.
Was the difference that we have mass media invading our lives with endless notifications blowing up in our pockets? Was there some change in philosophy such that we now think politics is responsible for all existing aspects of life? Was there a political element here in that the media blew this wildly out of proportion as revenge against Trump and his deplorables? Or did our excessive adoration of predictive modelling get out of control to the point that we let a physicist with ridiculous models frighten the world’s governments into violating the human rights of billions of people?
Maybe all of these were factors. Or maybe there is something darker and nefarious at work, as the conspiracy theorists would have it.
Regardless, they all have some explaining to do.
By way of personal recollection, my own mother and father were part of a generation that believed they had developed sophisticated views of viruses. They understood that less vulnerable people getting them not only strengthened immune systems but contributed to disease mitigation by reaching “herd immunity.” They had a whole protocol to make a child feel better about being sick. I got a “sick toy,” unlimited ice cream, Vicks rub on my chest, a humidifier in my room, and so on.
They would constantly congratulate me on building immunity. They did their very best to be happy about my viruses, while doing their best to get me through them.
If we used government lockdowns then like we use them now, Woodstock (which changed music forever and still resonates today) would never have occurred. How much prosperity, culture, tech, etc. are losing in this calamity?
What happened between then and now? Was there some kind of lost knowledge, as happened with scurvy, when we once had sophistication and then the knowledge was lost and had to be re-found? For COVID-19, we reverted to medieval-style understandings and policies, even in the 21st century. It’s all very strange.
The contrast between 1968 and 2020 couldn’t be more striking. They were smart. We are idiots. Or at least our governments are.
I believe we lost over 16,000 soldiers in VietNam that year.
Every life matters. /s
Well they had a lot the hippies sequestered out in the country. Me, I was a little busy that year.
Hong Kong Flu killed 100,000 Americans over the course of a full year.
Wuhan Flu has killed 60,000 Americans in six weeks.
Do some math.
Rumor has it that Congress will be voting soon to change the ending of our National Anthem to
“... the land of the masked and the home of the socially distanced.”
since the original words didn’t seem to apply any more.
\sarc
Everyone on FR is a statistician these days. Bad statisticians.
“...Rumor has it that Congress will be voting soon to change the ending of our National Anthem to: “... the land of the masked and the home of the socially distanced.”
since the original words didn’t seem to apply any more. \sarc
Don’t give the vile, demonic Botoxian and its band of merry communists any ideas.....LOL
dying since at least January (5 months), not 6 weeks.
Sex, drugs and rock and roll ...
There have been numerous reports, linked on Free Republic and other conservative websites, that the U.S. deaths from ChiCom virus are significantly inflated because in Demonicrat-controlled areas the deaths of other people (even those who test negative) have, for political purposes, been lumped in with ChiCom-caused deaths.
This is the global curve, but the US curve is similar.
We had a family member who was on hospice care for a cancerous brain tumor. He died because he was in resperatory distress. He was never tested but by CDC protocol was counted as a “presumptive Covid-19 death.
No one else in the family experienced any symptoms, but that doesn’t neccessarily mean anything. 11 people tested positive a month ago for coronavirus on the fire department I retired from. Two weeks later all tested negative with only one having any symptoms which he still has from his “hay fever”.
So strip out the noise, and just go with "excess" deaths (over normal times) from ALL CAUSES.
How do you explain the spikes in deaths FROM ALL CAUSES over the past weeks, all over the world? Unreported asteroid strikes? Tsunamis? What?
The USA is doing better than a lot of countries, but we are going to be stuck with this thing's global economic effects for a long time.
And it created some of the worst sanitary conditions this side of 19th. Century Hell’s Kitchen.
especially the ay they are piling eaths o the stats.
A friend lost her father to Alzheimer’s this week. He had also contracted CV19 but she knows it as the Alzheimer’s that killed him (and had been killing him).
Have you graphed the Hong Kong Flu pandemic, McGee?
Just curious.
Thanks for sharing a truly great article.
Should be required reading for everyone in the country.
New York State classified my great-uncle as a tobacco death because he chewed snuff.
He was 94.
I was in the Army in 69 to 72 and never heard of it either......
And FWIW, I never heard of the Apollo 13 space mission either. Kinda weird looking back on those days, never once did I watch the TV and can't even remember if we had one in the barracks........Since I was in Central America at the time, anything on TV would have been in Spanish anyways......LOL!
have a chart by month for Hong Kong flu US 1968 an 1969?
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