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

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2j6SZdsHLrnNd8nGFB5f5S/20-things-from-the-year-2000-that-will-make-you-feel-nostalgic

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

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/highestnumberofexcesswinterdeathssince19992000/2015-11-25

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.

https://www.thepoke.co.uk/2020/10/17/ceefax-pandemic-happened-in-90s/

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.