Woodstock Occurred in the Middle of a Pandemic

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Thanks, and for further perspective:

How did America endure (by the grace of God): Major modern influenza pandemics: Basic source is from Wikipedia, but with specific US data added as well as for the 2017-18 flu season, with other words in [brackets] being added, and formatting improved, while reference numbers are removed for clarity (see original for such)

Name	[Main]Date	U.S. population	World pop.	Sub-type	Reproduction rate	Infected W.W. (est.)	U.S. Deaths	[Tot.] Deaths world-wide	U.S. fatality rate	[World] Case fatality rate	Pandemic severity	I also added this column: During the 2017-2018 flu season the the % of deaths attributed to pneumonia and influenza (P&I) was at or above the epidemic threshold for 16 consecutive weeks, and exceeded 10.0% for four consecutive weeks, with older Americans dying at a rate of 169 Americans a day, or seven people per hour. For this 2019-20 season, the CDC reports (March 28) that deaths due to P&I was 7.4%, which is above the epidemic threshold of 7.3%. The increase is due to an increase in pneumonia deaths rather than influenza deaths and may be associated with COVID-19. However, the CDC reported that the flu rate is low even though the percentage of pneumonia and influenza is above the epidemic threshold of 7.0% for week 15. And here it listed 52,285 deaths for Week 13 and 49,292 deaths for Week 14 as of 4-18) ) for Influenza Deaths and Pneumonia Deaths combined. And note that some of the latter can be assigned to Covid.
1889–90 flu pandemic [Russian influenza]	1889–90	62,979,766	1.53 billion	Likely H3N8 or H2N2	2.10 (IQR, 1.9–2.4)[33]	20–60% (300–900 million)	[13,000**]	1 million	N/A	0.10–0.28%	2
1918 flu	1918–20	103,208,000	1.80 billion	H1N1	1.80 (IQR, 1.47–2.27)	33% (500 million) or >56% (>1 billion)	[500,000 to 675,000]	20–100 million	N/A	2–3% or ~4%, or ~10% ~10%	5
Asian flu	1957–58	171,984,130	2.90 billion	H2N2	1.65 (IQR, 1.53–1.70)	>17% (>500 million)	[116,000]	1–4 million	N/A	<0.2% [0.6%]	2
Hong Kong flu	1968–69	200,706,052	3.53 billion	H3N2	1.80 (IQR, 1.56–1.85)	>14% (>500 million)	[100,000]	1–4 million	N/A	<0.2%	2
2009 flu pandemic	2009–10	308,745,538	6.85 billion	H1N1/09	1.46 (IQR, 1.30–1.70)	11-21% (0.7–1.4 billion)	[12,469]	151,700–575,400	[0.02%]	0.03%	1
2017–18 flu season*	2017–2018	325,084,756	7.53 billion	H1N1 / H3N2	1.53	45 million	[61,099 (prior est. 80,000)]	N/A		N/A	N/A
Typical seasonal flu	Every year		7.75 billion	A/H3N2, A/H1N1, B, ...	1.28 (IQR, 1.19–1.37)	5–15% (340 million – 1 billion) 3–11% or 5–20% (240 million–1.6 billion)	[12,000 to 61,000]	290,000–650,000/year	N/A	<0.1%	1
2019–20 seasonal flu	2019–20	330,541,013	7.75 billion	A(H1N1)pdm09, B/Victoria, A(H3N2)	[1.4 to about 5]	11%[t 2] (800 million[t 2])	[Over 24,000 as of March 28]	0.45-1.2 million[t 2])	N/A	ongoing	1
COVID-19	2019–20	330,541,013	7.75 billion			[3,426,413 5-2 11am]	[66,000 approx. as of 5-2]	[240,500 approx. as of 5-2 11am]	N/A
[Notes * P+I deaths at or above epidemic threshold for 16 consecutive weeks. *as should be assumed in other cases, death rates include those due to complications accompanying the flu. We have the CDC morality rates for the flu per state for 2017-18 (13 states above 17 per 100,000 total population) and for Covid here (only 8 states above 17 per 100,000 people, as of April 24). And according to estimates, between 61,000 to 80,000 Americans died during the 2017-2018 season, the latter being the highest death toll in 40 years. During that 2017-2018 season, the percentage of deaths attributed to pneumonia and influenza (P&I) was at or above the epidemic threshold for 16 consecutive weeks. Nationally, mortality attributed to P&I exceeded 10.0% for four consecutive weeks, peaking at 10.8% during the week ending January 20, 2018, (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season/flu-season-2017-2018.htm)* with older Americans dying at a rate of 169 Americans a day, or seven people per hour. (https://www.aarp.org/health/conditions-treatments/info-2018/older-flu-deaths-rising.html It is estimated that about 80% of those infected with Covid-19 experience a mild case [WHO said the like] – about as serious as a regular cold – and recover without needing any special treatment. Meanwhile a study in Iceland reports that as of April 11, the country has “tested 10% of its population for coronavirus - a figure far higher than anywhere else in the world -” and that “about half of its citizenry at any given time who have coronavirus but don't know it, will be asymptomatic” (show no symptoms), which is “a large percentage many experts studying the virus have suspected, but have had little firm data to corroborate.” Another report is that those who are most vulnerable to death from Covid-19 are the aged with certain other heath conditions, thus 80 percent of US coronavirus deaths are people 65 and older. Then again, America murders over 2,000 of the most vulnerable souls a day (2017: https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/induced-abortion-united-states), while (for perspective) about 90 people die each day in the US from crashes, which are among the over 7,000 Americans who die every day in the US from a wide range of causes. (https://www.weisspaarz.com/leading-causes-death-by-state/) Other infectious diseases include: Severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and the mortality rate for SARS, that killed nearly 800 people, is estimated at 1 % by the C C, and with a R rating of 5. MERS, which stands for Middle East re respiratory syn drone, had a mortality rate of 5% and a R rating of 2]. Measles: Mortality rate: unclear; R rating: 12 to 18 Ebola Mortality rate: exceeds 50% R rating: about 2 Source: .cnbc.com]

Supplemental: Mortality rates (death rate per year, 2002 worldwide[4]) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.