The Untold Story of the 1968 Flu Pandemic
Imagine a nation confronted with a pandemic virus that causes no panic, no calls for drastic action, and no lockdown. Imagine this society, untethered to cell phones and social media, without 24/7 cable news and constant reminders of the current infection rates. The virus, like every other virus since the dawn of our species, simply runs its natural course and flames out.
Starting in late 1968 and extending through most of 1969, the world experienced a pandemic—probably originating in China—called the Hong Kong flu. The virus caused about 1 million deaths worldwide and an estimated 100,000 deaths in the US. Adjusted for population, that would be roughly 165,000 deaths today. The Hong Kong Flu accounted for nearly 5% of total US deaths in 1969.
Those figures are very similar to the current figures for COVID-19; assuming current figures are accurate, the United States has had ~138,000 casualties. Through the entire course of the Hong Hong flu, people continued working, schools stayed open, and a multi-trillion dollar experiment in locking down the economy was never considered. A broadly effective vaccine was never developed and the Hong Kong flu continues to circulate today as a seasonal virus.
I was 12 years old at the beginning of 1969. My days consisted mostly of adventures with neighborhood friends—playing football or baseball, exploring nearby woods, and discovering & playing in abandoned construction sites. Compared to a contemporary childhood of prearranged play dates and video games, I may have been exposed to a slightly elevated risk of contracting the Hong Kong flu.
Yet nothing tragic ever happened, and the experience of scrapes, insects, and dirt probably helped cultivate a much stronger immune system. I wouldn't trade a single day spent with friends in the woods for a lifetime of supervised play dates. Our activities were created, directed, and policed by kids themselves. We wandered far from home, gaining a sense of ease and comfort with the outside world. Parental involvement was neither needed nor wanted.
Unlike modern ‘helicopter parents,' my parents' generation didn't think they could completely eliminate risk from the lives of their kids. In fact, they assumed that granting us independence allowed us to recognize, respect, and better calibrate risk in our lives. In contrast, we are now beginning to see the effects of childhoods free of risk: a diminished sense of autonomy and a lack of resilience. It is a generation that has not had the crucial advantage of being formed by free play. By every behavioral metric, they suffer from high levels of boredom, fear, anxiety, and depression.
[We Interviewed a 10-Year-Old About Coronavirus]
There is a superficial appeal to applying the same mentality of zero-tolerance, fear-based risk aversion to the public policy approach to coronavirus. If only we can completely avoid the virus, we can banish its threat. The outcomes can be engineered by some authority figure–a parent, a governor, a president. Forces of nature can be corralled and controlled.
Certainly, today’s coronavirus is serious and sometimes deadly. We should focus our resources to protect the segments of the population most vulnerable to coronavirus: the elderly and those with underlying conditions.
Yet the obliteration of risk, and the complete suppression of COVID-19, is likely impossible. Attempting to do so carries massive unintended consequences: unemployment and the financial decimation of blue-collar America, massive public deficits that will burden our children, a dystopian increase in state power, 130 million people (mostly in Africa) on the verge of starvation, an increase in psychological damage and suicide, and the permanent destruction of many of our small businesses.
1969 turned out to be an eventful year. The Stonewall riots marked the beginning of the gay rights movement. We witnessed the first man to walk on the moon. In August, the Woodstock Music and Art Festival took place. There is no record of anyone in attendance wearing a mask. Despite the elevated risk and various discomforts of Woodstock, would a single one of the 500,000 attendees now express regret for having been there? Would our society and culture have been more vibrant if Woodstock never happened?
Paradoxically, in order to have a positive, functioning society, we depend upon countless individual decisions that embrace personal autonomy, the calibration of risk, and the cultivation of individual resilience. In 1969, we seem to have implicitly understood these values. In 2020, we must now fight for them.
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