MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
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What if Covid had happened before the digital age, or perhaps more significantly, before the social media age of the last 10 years?
The ultimate way to deal with a pandemic is to find a vaccine and that could be as true now as before but beyond that given, the what ways in which we are dealing (technologicaly, politically and culturally) with the pandemic are very much shaped by technology, and we're in the middle of the greatest technological and informational revolution since the development of the printing press.
I'm trying to imagine what it would have been like if a similar pandemic had broken out when I was a child in the 80's under Thatcher. Would we have been subjected to public information films such as 'duck and cover'? I suppose we have to factor in that the 80's was the era of the cold war, and that would have had an influence on how information would have been disseminated as well.
HIV?
Covid-00 ?
HIV?
You were able to catch HIV from being sneezed on?
HIV?
more a disease than viral dandemic as not as easy to catch as C19
Fill your boots/slippers with nostalgia...
The Internet was pretty well established 20 years ago.
You were able to catch HIV from being sneezed on?
Not in the conventional sense.
I'd done about a year on ITU and would have left sharpish, establishing a florists business which would go on to expand into a successful franchise business. I would have invested the money from that into a chain of coffee shops then cashed in and bought the Isle of Skye. After making all the islanders into share holders I would have gone on and invented the flying car and the protein pill and then set up a campaign to annexe the North West of England, creating the Republic of Lancastria.
I’d be interested to see how it would have played out in the decades before mass intercontinental holidaying and business travel being the norm. Harder to spread and catch but harder to probably track back in those days too.
Sounds like you mean 40 years ago, not twenty.
+1 I think the op is forgetting their age!
Kids' Covid parties, just get it done with and carry on.
I think that the NHS would have been in a better place to cope as would public health bodies . Our government at the time was not so ideologically wedded to the private sector and certainly more competent. So IMO healthcare response would have been better - bar tratments and ITUs are more sophisticated now
Less international travel would have slowed transmission
Would less international travel have given greater time to make better decisions on how to deal with it though? Closing borders or preventing entry from countries affected maybe? All speculation of course.
Less international travel would have slowed transmission
The nineties/ early aughts was surely the peak of international business travel? And foreign holidays were certainly my still well in the reach of the masses.
80’s and earlier I would have agreed with your assessment
Well, we did have a fairly massive flu outbreak in 1999/2000.
This ONS page says
Very high levels of flu were seen in 1999/00, when there were 48,000 excess winter deaths
I don't recall anything unusual happening at all, other than lots of fireworks on December 31st. I think I was at a party near Sheffield.
IT infrastructure wasn't in place 10 to 15 years ago, people generally would not have been WFH.
It did but it was in livestock - Foot and Mouth.
It very nearly did. I was a medical SHO in 2002/3 and can vividly remember the excitement about SARS, which was also cause by a coronavirus and killed lots of people in SE Asia.
I suspect the ITU mortality would’ve been even higher given that things like lung protective ventilation weren’t really established practice then (if memory serves, ARDSnet published round about then too).
Work from home would have been virtually impossible for the majority. Put it at 25 years and that would definitely have been the case.
The balance of save the economy or save lives would have been even more difficult because of this.
I was vague about the dates I know, I'm more focused on how the world of the last 10 years or so. has in some ways changed more fundamentally than the differences between 10, 20 or 40 years ago. We're a variety of ages on here so was curious to hear different perspectives, the 80's came to mind for me because that's when I was growing up.
It's interesting how the pandemic arrived just a a time when online shopping and delivery, zoom meetings, connecting around the world in a milsecond etc. In some ways the systems in place are far more robust in the face of the pandemic than they would have been a decade ago.
Not looking for specifics just general thoughts, I often think how the pandemic would have affected me differently if it happened a few years ago without the technological systems in place we have now. I know the internet was invented decades ago etc but I'm talking about the more recent, ubiquitous presence of technology.
Errr.... Spanish Flu in 1917-20 ish...
The millennium bug?!
SARS?
The Black Death?
International travel is not a modern thing. People have been traveling internationally for thousands of years. Spanish Flu in early 1900's, long before air travel, did OK killing 50 million people and the Back Death did similarly well killing 25 million people in the Middle Ages. COVID 19 has just tipped over 1 million despite the most efficient global people moving transport system the planet has ever seen.
that ceefax page is great!
This may come as a shock, but the first recombinant vaccine was approved 14 years earlier (hep B, 1986). So we would be looking for a vaccine. Perhaps not an RNA one though. We’d be struggling without good robotic testing, we’d still have nothing but dexamethasone. I’d be in the Imperial group doing sums on covid00, rather than looking for treatments (joined GSK in jan 2000).
I do wonder if before 24hr rolling news, social media and a high degree of digitisation of data, we could have had an epidemic such as Covid and not really noticed as such, outside medical circles. And statisticians would have noticed, but 6-12 months down the line and far to late to bang any drums about it. That ONS data about the flu in 2000 a few post above is interesting; it talks of 48,000 ‘extra’ deaths over a winter. Around 43,000 deaths in the U.K. have been attributed to COVID so far I think, so broadly comparable numbers. I had just started worked for the NHS during 2000, and recall no fuss or fluster about those numbers. I certainly don’t recall it being a big deal in the press, although my attention priorities were somewhat different back then.
Errr…. Spanish Flu in 1917-20 ish…
This is probably the best example. From my hazy memory of the online articles I've seen about it, it wasn't actually Spanish. It appeared during the war, but the combatant countries didn't want to acknowledge it for security reasons so Spain was where the outbreak was first publicized. In other words, you don't need the internet to notice that there's a pandemic, but you do need honest data sharing.
Then they had lockdowns and so forth, which damped it down, but people got sick of the lockdowns and started ignoring it, so it flared up again. In other words, they knew how to combat a pandemic, but the political will wasn't there to enforce unpopular lockdowns.
Obviously, they didn't have the modern understanding of DNA and genome sequencing, or the modern tools to create vaccines, but they did have understanding of immunization. Modern medical knowledge didn't miraculously appear fully formed in the 21st century, it was developed over decades. My guess would be that Cold War research into bioweapons was probably one of the main drivers of developments. When HIV appeared, it took a while to identify the virus, but once they did, they immediately looked at whether they could create a vaccine. As I understand it, HIV is a very difficult moving target, so the lack of a vaccine isn't because researchers didn't know how to make them in the 80s, but because there are fundamental problems with making one for HIV. Other diseases like smallpox and polio have been pretty much eradicated. Those efforts started many decades ago, so it's not the case that researchers didn't understand how to fight disease until the internet was invented.
The WFH thing mostly affects comfortably off educated people (me being a prime example). We think everything's going fine because we're sitting at home getting paid to watch YouTube. Most workers are not in that situation and huge numbers are struggling. The recession probably hasn't fully hit yet, so the next few years could be economically devastating. WFH won't save you if the economy collapses.
@ hols2
You are completely right, in addition Spain got hit very hard with the Influenza, even members of the royal family got it. We still don’t know 100% where it originated from .
This may come as a shock, but the first recombinant vaccine was approved 14 years earlier (hep B, 1986). So we would be looking for a vaccine.
Wasn’t there something in the news a while back about one of the teams looking for a COVID-19 vaccine dusting off the work they’d done on SARS? While I’m neither a virologist or an epidemiologist, I though SARS just sort of went away, so the vaccine was never needed…
Of course this tv show from 1975 makes it pretty clear that the potential for a pandemic was well understood. Probably something to do with the Black Death etc. being remembered as a bit of a disaster.
Have a look at the other pandemics of 1957 and 1968
We still don’t know 100% where it originated from .
I thought it was a poultry farm I the States. It got into one of the big training camps for American troops and infected several troop ships in the Atlantic. It only became the Spanish Flu during the second wave post 1918 for the reasons above. Again the second wave originated amongst the American military. It was Spanish Flu because they reported it I'm the press, other countries didn't still having wartime censorship in place.
Smallpox is an interesting one to look at as you can go back much further to a spike in 1871 and the mandatory requirement of vaccines introduced. A lot less people, a lot less travel but still a pretty high death rater per million at 1,000.
I think that even in the 80s the state was much larger than it is now, and people were more used to turning to the government to run things. That's why Thatcher did what she did, and why there were all those strikes. How many people still worked for nationalised industries in 1980? Things were socially and politically quite different in 1980 than in 1918 I think.
My guess is that we'd probably have had a tighter lockdown, for longer, and people would have been paid more to stay home. Because without the ability for so many people to WFH, governments would have had no choice. And because pretty much any government would have handled it better than this lot. And Cummings was probably still only a kid at the time....
Pre Jenner, the Chinese and Ottomans used Variolation as a way of protecting against smallpox - using a small amount of puss from a recovering smallpox victim to inoculate children. It worked, although the mortality rate was higher than with the vaccines that replaced it.
Convalescent plasma was used in the 1919 flu, as was x-ray treatment.
Good interesting thread though. We should differentiate between 20 years ago and 40 though.
People used to watch telly. And you only had 3 or 4 channels, so you would've seen it on the news. The chances of missing vital information like "FACE SPACE CHASE" (or whatever, you know, the VITAL stuff) because you were glued to Love Island or series 27 episode 99 of your favourite "BOXSET" on Netflix would've been more remote.
I'm actually feeling quite nostalgic for a time when there was no outlet for all the idiots and conspiracy theorists.
“FACE SPACE CHASE”
I’m actually feeling quite nostalgic for a time when there was no outlet for all the idiots and conspiracy theorists.
I think more in terms of ‘inlet’
I remember (as a kid) the TV often being referred to as ‘the idiot box’
The inference wasn’t so much that only foolish/gullible/dumbed-down/sedentary people watched it - rather that it created such people.
Remember - ‘You’re eyes will go square’? ‘TV is a drug?’
There was at least the brief escape back to real life afforded by a broadcast curfew every evening.
And then along came the internet, and the ‘squares’ became bigger, smaller, mobile! 24-7/365. Entertainment, infotainmemt, advertainment, newstainment, misinfotainment, outragetainmemt, divideandconquertainment...
We can only become smarter.
I think if this had happened in the 1980s it would have spread more slowly, a lot more people would have died* but we wouldn't really have noticed it as much.
At its worst there might have been a sober suited man from the ministry giving the official news report on evening telly - like that guy during the Falklands war.
*Or would they? Covid hits the elderly worst, but the population in the 1980s wasn't as top heavy as it is now.
I do wonder if before 24hr rolling news, social media and a high degree of digitisation of data, we could have had an epidemic such as Covid and not really noticed as such, outside medical circles. And statisticians would have noticed, but 6-12 months down the line and far to late to bang any drums about it. That ONS data about the flu in 2000 a few post above is interesting; it talks of 48,000 ‘extra’ deaths over a winter. Around 43,000 deaths in the U.K. have been attributed to COVID so far I think, so broadly comparable numbers. I had just started worked for the NHS during 2000, and recall no fuss or fluster about those numbers. I certainly don’t recall it being a big deal in the press, although my attention priorities were somewhat different back then.
I was also amazed at the excess deaths in 2000. I remember that year vividly and the news was about Millennium Bugs, not Flu but we have to remember Covid didn't really take hold in the UK until Spring, and the number of 'excess deaths' in the UK this year has been much higher than the number of confirmed Covid tests, whilst they were originally classifying anyone who'd ever had Covid as a covid death, even months after testing which might have had a small effect on numbers they're also not testing people who die at home or care homes for Covid postmortem. I believe the excess deaths figure for 2020 is in the 60k range so far, and we haven't reached Winter 20/21 yet.
I do wonder if before 24hr rolling news, social media and a high degree of digitisation of data, we could have had an epidemic such as Covid and not really noticed as such, outside medical circles.
I think you may be hitting a nail on its head there.
However with Covid not quite being flu, it might have been news.
SARS didn't really make many peoples radar though, despite being reported through regular news channels. Obviously there was also the "didn't happen here, not interested" factor.
It would have been big news once the hospitals stopped all admissions and AEs had to shut. Such things were widely covered on the radio, TV and newspapers at the time.
The proportion of the population over 65 was smaller (15.1%) then it is now (18%) so there would have been a small reduction in impact.
There have been Flu epidemics in the last 60 years or so that have killed many more than Covid - tens of millions - but I suspect figures were largely retrospective. I strongly suspect that any more than 20 years or so ago we would have been unaware until after that event when recorded deaths were analysed.
One thing I think has changed over time is peoples attitudes to hardship. Our grandparents properly suffered in the Second World War. They would have had parents / grandparents that suffered in the First World War before that.
Younger generations now (including my middle aged self) have less experience of a direct problem of any magnitude and our expectations are so much higher.
p7eaven
I’m actually feeling quite nostalgic for a time when there was no outlet for all the idiots and conspiracy theorists.
I think more in terms of ‘inlet’....
I obviously need to [i]become smarter[/i] cos none of that made any sense to me.
The rolling news thing is significant. In 2001 rolling news had been about for quite a few years but viewing figures and engagement was minimal. Come The 11th September the whole world became glued to it and hasnt been able to look away since, me included. I think there's a fallacy attached to engaging with rolling news, one that makes us feel that because we are 'better informed' we can somehow have an influence on events which we obviously can't. All it does is increase anxiety and pushes governments and institutions into more tactical rather than strategic responses, a bit like 'In play' betting.
The image of Defence Minister John Knott giving out his daily briefings during the Falklands conflict came into my mind as well, I dont think we'd have seen the smorgasbord of actors we see at todays daily briefings.
We'd have all been wearing masks from day one of covid being announced as a pandemic as well, there wouldn't have been the endless debate about their efficacy (would have saved a few pages on the Coronavirus thread as well, had it existed then!). I too remember TV being described as 'The idiot box', that was from a time when our brains could still detect idiocy, a time before our brains were completely replaced by computers, tablets and 'smart' phones.
"I obviously need to become smarter cos none of that made any sense to me."
Perhaps you do Dez because I understood that perfectly. The media hat to provide an 'inlet' for all those BTL 'opinions'. I remember a time pre 9/11 when Sunday mornings were about popping down to the newsagents to pick up the Sunday Times, the Observer or the Sunday Telegraph, spreading it out over the living room floor and digesting a good portion of the contents throughout the rest of the week.
Now I (we) click on numerous newspaper sites multiple times throughout the day. Imformation, (albeit skewed by editorial bias) has been replaced by a million opinions. If I click on the Telegraph website because a headline has garnered my curiosity I come face to face with a paywall, where the information is occluded by a 'become a subscriber' message, though the BTL comments are left open for all to see. Opinion literally Trumping information.
Similarly with BBC's Question Time, where in the interest of balance, it has become important to represent the gamut of public opinion and 'feelings' irrespective of their relation to fact, reflecting the BBC's struggle to keep up (or down) with the changing face of digital news media.
OK yeah, but when I said idiots and conspiracy theorists, that's who I actually meant.
ie. not [i]all[/i] the information.
I strongly suspect that any more than 20 years or so ago we would have been unaware until after that event when recorded deaths were analysed.
No, it would have been very obvious that there was a pandemic.
There have been Flu epidemics in the last 60 years or so that have killed many more than Covid – tens of millions – but I suspect figures were largely retrospective. I strongly suspect that any more than 20 years or so ago we would have been unaware until after that event when recorded deaths were analysed.
Google suggests the pandemics of the 50s and 60s killed around 1 million each. We've already hit that figure despite being quick to lock down and introduce unprecedented restrictions across the world. We also have almost three quarters of a century's worth of medical science on our side. I guess it would be difficult to estimate the impact of the hypothetical scenario where we had 'not noticed' and carried on as is, but it might be reasonable to assume the death toll to be far higher than it is, and still with a long way to go as it burns through the population.
Even with a 99% survival rate, if only half of the population were to catch it, we'd see around 40 million deaths. That's Spanish Flu territory, albeit with a larger population.
The faster it spreads, the more overwhelmed health services become, the more that survival rate is likely to go down. And further down again the further you go back in history, before advancements in technology.
It seems a slim chance it would have gone unnoticed.
You’re right I’m thinking of earlier flu pandemics - 100 years ago 20-50 million and then late 50s and 60s 1-4 million. Still in some ways had this happened at an earlier time it could well have spread more slowly due to everyone travelling so much more these days (at least until 6 months anyway...)
Well, we did have a fairly massive flu outbreak in 1999/2000.
This ONS page says
Very high levels of flu were seen in 1999/00, when there were 48,000 excess winter deaths
And 2017, but nobody noticed:
The number of winter deaths last year the hit highest level in more than 40 years after the failure of last year's flu jab. There were an estimated 50,100 excess winter deaths in England and Wales in 2017/18 - the highest recorded since winter 1975/76, figures from the Office for National Statistics show.
And 2015, but nobody noticed:
Between December 2014 and March 2015 there were 44,000 excess winter deaths, 2.5 times higher than the record low of the previous winter, and the highest number since the winter of 1999/2000
I’m not looking at any more figures for deaths - it’s depressing!
Covid would probably have been less of a problem 20 or 40 years ago on the following counts:
- less devolution so easier for the government to take a decision and implement it
- same goes for the “Metro” mayors
- more people would have read newspapers vs relying on social media and algorithmic echo chambers for their news
- aside from David Icke, the “reach” of conspiracy theorists was a lot lower
- mainstream media was less focussed on monetising clicks - the news outlets didn’t need to “make” news in order to have something to fill rolling 24 hour news coverage. And yes, CNN did exist then but we didn’t have multiple rolling news channels competing with each other.
- personal hygiene was better, particularly hand washing. In 20 years we seem to have gone from some blokes not washing their hands after a pee to most blokes not bothering, and an increasing number of people (based on the offices I’ve worked in) who take a dump whilst on the phone and don’t even wash their hands after that.
- facts and logic actually trumped emotions and “feelings” in public debate
The main difference for me though would be the difference in numbers of narcissists / influencers etc and more people looking out for each other.
I remember a time pre 9/11 when Sunday mornings were about popping down to the newsagents to pick up the Sunday Times
Yesterday? Still do after my dose of Broadcasting House on R4.
The moon landing hoax conspiracy theory started shortly after the event. That took a little while to gain traction AFAIK, but it did. That was pre-internet.
And there was a lot of misinformation spread about HIV in the 80s.
BS can reach the masses faster but there have always been people willing to help it on its journey.
The NHS would have coped well because it was run by people who knew their business. That collective memory has been lost now that the NHS is run by consultants.