More like 20,000. Remember who's telling us the news.
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 don’t know that anybody graphed it back in 1968. But it’s pretty well written up in Wikipedia, so you can mentally chart your own graph. As you will read below, it got to the USA in September 1968, and returned in waves until 1972. 100,000 Americans were killed by HKF in total.
(Compared to 60,000 Americans killed by Wuhan Flu so far, most of them in the past 6 weeks.)
Hong Kong flu
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Hong Kong flu (also known as 1968 flu pandemic[1]) was a flu pandemic whose outbreak in 1968 and 1969 killed an estimated one million people all over the world.[2][3][4] It was caused by an H3N2 strain of the influenza A virus, descended from H2N2 through antigenic shift, a genetic process in which genes from multiple subtypes reassorted to form a new virus.
The first record of the outbreak in Hong Kong appeared on 13 July 1968. By the end of July 1968, extensive outbreaks were reported in Vietnam and Singapore. Despite the lethality of the 1957 Asian Flu in China, little improvement had been made regarding the handling of such epidemics. The Times newspaper was the first source to sound alarm regarding this new possible pandemic. There is a possibility that this outbreak actually began in mainland China before spreading to Hong Kong, but this is unconfirmed.[5]
By September 1968, the flu reached India, the Philippines, northern Australia, and Europe. That same month, the virus entered California from returning Vietnam War troops but did not become widespread in the United States until December 1968. It would reach Japan, Africa, and South America by 1969.[6] The outbreak in Hong Kong, where population density is greater than 6,000 people per square kilometre, reached maximum intensity in two weeks, lasting six months in total from July to December 1968. However, worldwide deaths from this virus peaked much later, in December 1968 and January 1969. By that time, public health warnings[7] and virus descriptions[8] were issued in the scientific and medical journals.
In comparison to other pandemics, the Hong Kong flu yielded a low death rate. [6]
This pandemic struck in two waves with the second wave being deadlier than the first in most places.[9]
The same virus returned the following years: a year later, in late 1969 and early 1970, and in 1972. The total worldwide death toll is estimated to have been in the region of one million people.
Elective procedures... Travis must have helped design Android autocorrect.
On the other hand, smoking was common and widespread. There's studies that show that nicotine fights coronavirus.
America was better when they allowed smoking commercials, and banned lawyer commercials.
Fireman, thank you for your consistently intelligent, articulate, and insightful replies.
Your contributions to the level of discussion on this topic make you a true credit to Free Republic.
See 22.
More like 20,000. Remember who's telling us the news.
Thanks for showing off your impressive cutting and pasting abilities from the world’s greatest supplier of global warming propoganda. They are so reliable on this subject too... I am sure.
#13 answers that point.
I am sorry Trav, you polluting our discussions with leftist BS has put me on edge. Unfortunately, despite having your idiocy revealed day after day... you keep using the same exact disproved material.
On top of that, they had to deal with the brown acid.
The death count is suspicious because hospitals get more money from the feds when it's a chicom-virus death, and there have been lots of allegations that the counts are manipulated.
Actually, in '68 I was on an extended tropical vacation and taking quinine. I knew of Woodstock; but, like many others here, was not aware of the HK flu.
In any case, the death rate would be more comparable, but you can do your own math. The point is: between a totalitarian lockdown and doing nothing at all, there should be a better solution. Now WHO is telling us Sweden is the better model.
“I am sorry Trav, you polluting our discussions with leftist BS has put me on edge. Unfortunately, despite having your idiocy revealed day after day... you keep using the same exact disproved material.”
Show me where it’s disproved, Flu-Bro.
Copy and paste, post the links, show the data.
All you do is throw insults, but no facts.
Typical moron Flu-Bro.
America was better when they allowed smoking commercials, and banned lawyer commercials.
= = = = = = = = = =
And BIG PHARM...
Notice they will run a ‘bright eyed bushy tailed’ commercial with someone feeling ‘run down’, take these pills and ‘immediate cure’
THEN there is a long list of POSSIBLE side effects to ‘cover their arses’.
In a couple of years or less, lawyers start running commercials about the latest ‘miracle drug’ and how it may be secretly killing you.
Stir, mix, repeat....
Like the man said, why cure ????? when others can get rich ‘finding a cure’.
Next thing you know they will be letting ALL of our medications be produced in other countries where we are at their whim when a ‘crisis’ hits.
FOLLOW THE MONEY
Their parents, who were born at the end of the great depression to parents who fought in WWI would have strung up a group of politician who engineered 30% unemployment on purpose and told them to wear masks and where to walk, like they were domesticated animals. This whole thing is a sick joke.
The numbers are being fudged too, we have been told a load of lies to promote a depression and the Dem who can fix it all!
My wife is a retired nurse and department head at multi-level care facilities, I am a retired fire officer and spent 25 years in the back of rescue units transporting people with communicable resperatory illnesses to the hospital. My last 10 years I was one of the leaders on our big city hazmat team frequently drilling with the military for chemical and biological hazards.
One of the primary things I learned from all that experience was how to recognize a twit who thinks he knows it all. Your nonsense isn’t worth the time it takes to refute it. Any graph that is based on a running total of anything is going to have an upward slope... the graphs you are sharing are completely meaningless. The fact that you do not seem to have a grasp of this demonstrates that you have no reasoning abilities.
To the far left of that particular graph, over January, there is a curve line that appears higher than the 20 K curve line.
Any idea what caused that death spike, apparently higher than the one focused on?
There’s lies, damn lies, and statistics.
So did my dad. He went off to a far away land, met new people, and killed them.
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