If Social Media had been around then just imagine the Hysteria, which is what we are seeing now. Fanning the flames does not help and I don't think shutting the country down will work either.
I remember the Hong Kong Flu. It was happening about the same time they were going to put “The Nutcracker Suite” on TV. I was about 6 years old. My mother wouldn’t let me stay up to watch it. It didn’t scar me for life.
These terms, along with German measles and Spanish flu are racist and should be stricken from our lexicon.
Social media and extensive “globalization” did not exist before this pandemic.
I imagine those two factors drive a lot of this.
To this day, I remember how sick my whole family was in 1957. I was 7-years old. My folks were tough people who never slowed down - but this time they were in bed for at least four days. My baby brother was not good at all. I must have thrown up five times a day for about a week.
Interestingly enough, I remember old Dr. Humphreys making a house call each day for our family. He did not get ill.
But we’re doing so much better now you see? All we have to do is destroy the economy and people’s lives to defeat this thing.
Barf.
I guess we just didn't know what was good for us...
The “Hong Kong” and “Asian” flu? How did these racist names survive for so long? I’m aghast. AGHAST I tell ya!
case closed!
Same thing with Vietnam war vs WWI/Korean War. Quick filming distribution shaped public mindset.
I had the Asian flu. As a kid I remember I called it the ‘Asiatic flu’. It was never called that, as a kid I thought that was the name.
I had it for about 3 weeks, with high fevers, was real sick. I still remember being on the couch watching tv forever and sooo sick.
Around, around, around go the satellites.
Asiatic flu is winning the fight.
Like "Around the World in 80 Days" too,
I've got the satellite fever and the Asiatic flu...
A satellite moves at 20,000 per,
Asiatic flu gets him or her.
About either one, there ain't much you can do,
I've got the satellite fever and the Asiatic flu.
I remember the NYPD being hit with a big wave of cases of “Hong Kong Flu”(/s) at the start of the epidemic. Then the rest of us got it. Thankfully, my boss’s wife would stop by my tenement with a hot lunch for me every day. Ya gotta love chicken soup!
Got back to work after a week, still kinda weak, and the next day my boss was down and I had to take care of the business myself. His wife continued to stop by with a hot lunch for me since I couldn’t leave.
Boss also showed his appreciation in my pay envelope for my running the business for the week he was gone.
This is not the flu, its amazing that people still don’t get that.
That said the reaction has been way over the top and much of the fear has been engineered. At this point I am far more concerned about the economy, we are doing massive damage to our economy.
Heck, I remember getting the mumps in the fall of ‘69. The chicken pocks also, which I had in the mid 60’s.
German measles, (Rubella) was also the big scare.
Thanks for a good overview.
I was born in 1951, so I was 6 for the 1957 pandemic. We lived in Whitesboro, NY at the time (suburb of Utica). Nobody got sick.
In 1968, we had moved to Chesterfield, MO in the St. Louis western suburbs. I call hearing about the Hong Kong flu. Nobody got sick.
In 2020, I’m splitting time between California and Idaho. So far, nobody got sick (knock on wood!).
There’s no doubt globalization and instantaneous global PERSONAL communications have fanned the flames of hysteria.
In 1957, only newspapers could transmit data and images globally. A few years after the 1957 pandemic and a few years before the 1968 pandemic, Walter Cronkite intoned, “Good evening, Europe. This is the North American continent live via AT&T Telstar, July 23, 1962.” That was the birth of instantaneous global TV which really impacted the perception of the war in Viet Nam a few years later.
Now we have instantaneous global person-to-person communications with text, images, audio and full video.
I would add a third big factor here: the fantastic growth of our understanding of molecular biology, the emergence tools to decode genomes, splice genes and the invention of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in 1983. Nations have various levels of biological safety controls with China reportedly being far from the best. Plus, nations are no doubt still clandestinely pursuing biological weapons and we have the possibility of the escape of a pathogen from a military lab.
The other day I saw some posts about Asian Flu, and called my parents to ask about it. They were kids in ‘57, and one of them has a 1-in-a-million memory (the other claims to have antibodies for that).
Answers: Neither one of them got either flu, and they were surrounded by filth and disease (cesspool NYC). They had measles, mumps and all sorts of poxes and plagues common to the era, but avoided both the ‘57 and the ‘68 flu. They knew exactly four people who had the ‘57 flu and one infant that died of it. Otherwise, they were mainly worried about polio, “the bomb,” “mono,” and Viet Nam.
Wish I’d been born much earlier. :(
I got the Hong Kong Flu in 1968...the doctor told me he had no medicine to give me and to “go home you will either die or get well”...
One thing I can correct about your dates...I had the Hong Kong Flu in August 1968...I was in New Zeeland...it was winter time there...If it started in China in July it could easily have gone to NZ right away...It may have started earlier though...
Oh and by the fall of 1969 (March-June) Australia had a shot for that flu...it was the first flu shots in that country...
Heck I didn’t even know there was a Hong Kong Flu in 1968. Nixon was president so the press must not have been completely weaponized at that point, though their bias was quite evident then.
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