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Imagine if all of this had happened in 1980?

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Meerkat

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In 1980 the UK much more manufacturing industry that could have made PPE, many more hospital beds (including all the huge psychiatric hospitals) and military hospitals that could have been turned over to caring for covid patients, and the full Cold War civil defence (remember "Protect and Survive"?) infrastructure in place. I think that we'd have coped pretty well.
We don’t have a shortage of beds, we have a risk of a shortage of ICU. Did we have more of that?
 
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DarloRich

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The answer is: Don't know

Much as dislike Thatcher I don't think she would not have tolerated the kind of chancers we have in power now. We would have been better prepared for some of the reasons @lyndhurst25 suggests. We had more medical staff, more soldiers, more policeman, a smaller ( and perhaps fitter) population. However we didn't have the kind of medical technology or the numbers of intensive care facilities we have today but we did travel less which might reduce the speed of transmission.

The spread of a virus might not have been so bad in 1980 with less international travel. Certainly in 1918 it must have been very hard for the virus to get across the world. Mind you the information on a virus would have travelled slower as well so maybe we are at an advantage there.

It seemed to move fairly easily across the globe!

40 years ago there was far less international travel and far less migration from the East to the West so chances are the virus would not have spread to the UK in the first place!


That didn't stop Spanish flu! I think there is some merit in your point regarding travel but there was still international travel and it doesn't take much to import this kind of thing ( think that super spreader at the start of this)

Even if you wanted to say something like "circa 100,000 deaths versus millions upon millions of other problems such unemployment, mental problems, suicides, illness, abused women, starving children, evictions etc" you can't. Apparently that's evil and we must save every single life because it's a numbers game.

I don't believe the above is an irrational argument. In three months time when unemployment skyrockets in the millions we may be in a position that this strategy of shutting down everything was unwise. Former supreme court judge Lord Sumption put it really well a couple of weeks ago that we appear to so afraid of death, no one even asks whether this 'cure' is actually worse. So true.


Lets hope you or someone you love is not in the group of people you so callously and casually throw away.
 

big all

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The spread of a virus might not have been so bad in 1980 with less international travel. Certainly in 1918 it must have been very hard for the virus to get across the world. Mind you the information on a virus would have travelled slower as well so maybe we are at an advantage there.
China was very much a closed country in the 80s with little human travel in or out and with far far less goods and far less reliance on their output for the production of western goods, plus little or no offering of services as there was no internet.
 
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Peter Sarf

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The answer is: Don't know

Much as dislike Thatcher I don't think she would not have tolerated the kind of chancers we have in power now.
.........

I gather Margaret Thatcher did not want to privatise the railways !.

.........
Lets hope you or someone you love is not in the group of people you so callously and casually throw away.

I think what is being said is that we have to consider whether, as a result of all this caution, we are going to "callously and casually throw away" more lives.

I have no idea which is best but, in the meantime, I am going for caution. Until we can be sure of the pros and cons we do not know which is worse. But at the moment there are people going without cancer treatment and routine tests and that will cost lives. More of those risks will have to be taken if the NHS is exposed to an even higher rate of COVID-19 admissions. Its a cruel choice either way I fear.
 

cuccir

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The underlying question I think is whether the benefits of tehcnological advancements since 1980 are offset by the disadvantages of our faser, more mobile and interconnected world. We have better medicine & technology for coping with social distancing, but are more reliant economically on people travelling long distances, and live on average further from our natural support networks of family and friends. I suspect we're better off now but the advances we've made in medicine since then are reduced by our increased mobility globally & nationally.
 

C J Snarzell

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I don't think the Government would have bailed out the country 40 years ago, agreeing to pay a lot of people's wages.

I'm sure Margaret Thatcher would have driven a hard stance on this anyway. She was not called the Iron Lady for nothing.

CJ
 

Ianigsy

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A few thoughts:

- We wouldn't necessarily have had the figures to show that there was a serious new virus around until much later in the day. Remember that it was the Yorkshire Ripper investigation which was the catalyst for computerisation of record keeping and collation.

-As has been pointed out, more bodies in the police and armed forces and towns and cities being more self-sufficient in general would make it easier to seal off unaffected areas or isolate cities with large numbers of infected.

-Public health was simply taken more seriously. In the 1970s and 1980s there was a very high profile anti-rabies campaign, for example, and due to the Cold War spare capacity in terms of military hospitals, army bases etc.

-Lower material expectations of life and most of the adult population having vivid memories of wartime and rationing would have meant more willingness to accept sacrifices. You wouldn't have entire shopping centres shut down because all the shops were considered non-essential.
 

StephenHunter

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Yes, being before the era of "fake news" would have helped. Though the Press were not as responsible as back in 1918.

Plenty of fake news back in 1980; the Soviet Union liked spreading it in particular.

Also, considering that it was the height of the Cold War, you can expect the Soviet bloc would have done pretty much what China has allegedly done in hiding death figures.
 

mrmartin

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In 1980 the UK much more manufacturing industry that could have made PPE, many more hospital beds (including all the huge psychiatric hospitals) and military hospitals that could have been turned over to caring for covid patients, and the full Cold War civil defence (remember "Protect and Survive"?) infrastructure in place. I think that we'd have coped pretty well.

I really disagree. Modern ventilator technology was in its complete infancy then. You might have had a load more hospital beds, but really no treatment. I'd be surprised if even basic CPAP machines existed then. The ventilators which would be available would be extremely rudimentary and ill-suited for keeping people breathing for 1-2 weeks. Plus there'd probably be a handful in the country, and it would be hard/impossible to ramp production as the computer chips required weren't available in mass numbers like now and extremely expensive.

Not much point having loads of hospital beds if they are effectively just the same as beds at home.
 

Chester1

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I really disagree. Modern ventilator technology was in its complete infancy then. You might have had a load more hospital beds, but really no treatment. I'd be surprised if even basic CPAP machines existed then. The ventilators which would be available would be extremely rudimentary and ill-suited for keeping people breathing for 1-2 weeks. Plus there'd probably be a handful in the country, and it would be hard/impossible to ramp production as the computer chips required weren't available in mass numbers like now and extremely expensive.

Not much point having loads of hospital beds if they are effectively just the same as beds at home.

Definitely agree. Plenty of rose tinted spectacles on display in this thread

In 2000 NHS England apparently had barely half the number of ventilators it had at the start of this crisis. Its a reasonable guess to say that the NHS had much fewer another 20 years earlier. 1980 UK could have massed produced a very large number of simple mechanical ventilators easily but we still have spare today and the sophistication matters if someone is on them for 1-2 weeks. China published the virus' full genetic code in January to help scientists worldwide to start work on treatments and vaccines. PPE is probably the only thing that 1980 UK could have done better than 2020 UK has, every other tool to fight a pandemic is light years ahead compared with 40 years ago.
 

squizzler

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I really disagree. Modern ventilator technology was in its complete infancy then.
Many things were in their infancy then. Myself for instance :) Personally, it would have been better if this whole business had been resolved when my own mobility was restricted to crawling distance anyway.

Modern technology has diminishing returns. For instance, during 1980 they were successfully electrifying St Pancras to Beford at much lower unit cost than the State-of-the Art GWML of the latter 2010's.

Similarly, creating a vaccine was easier back in the day. Our Victorian ancestors didn't go in for mincing about with gene sequencers: just rubbing some fluid from sores of a milkmaid into open cuts was good enough to create immunity from Smallpox.
 

route:oxford

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As for social media. In those days the 'one eyed god' * was taking over family life, all four channels of it iirc.

You had four channels in the 1970s? Guess you were on the border between ITV regions. My cousin in the North East was similar, if he swivelled the loop aerial on his b&w portable he could switch between Tyne Tees & Yorkshire (?).

I'm not sure overall things would have been better in 1980.

Covid-19 would have devasted the mining towns and villages, indeed any town focussed on an industry that we now know the workers suffered industrial lung disease.

Smoking was still quite common in 1980 too. Again, Covid-19 going straight for the lungs. Not to mention the asthma that I and many other kids suffered from with leaded fuel, single glazed windows, a coal fire in almost every home and chimney stacks for industry - those particulates going straight for the lungs and increasing risk to Covid-19.

NHS, my word, it's easy to forget how far we've come in 40 years. Looking back then it was practically quack medicine, yes we had anti-biotics and immunisation, but no MRIs, ultrasound was very specialist, you wouldn't find an ECG machine in your local health centre and there were no blood pressure monitors for £15 "in the middle at Lidl". Oh and when you broke a thermometer it was fun to play with the mercury.

Don't forget that "simple" elements like flexible safe plastics for use in things like ventilators were still new and expensive technology in the 70s and 80s. There's a reason why we don't let children use 1980s toys!

Just think of all the people killed through hepatitis in blood products.

The 70s and 80s weren't halcyon days of good behaviour either. It's hard to forget the Yorkshire Ripper or Fred West.
 

Bletchleyite

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We (in West Lancashire) used to have a second aerial to pick up S4C and HTV, but that was much more recent, early 90s I think.

Channel 4/S4C didn't start until the early to mid 80s, I remember it starting.
 

WAO

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Forty years ago (or more) there weren't as many spare electron microscopes (or any) DNA sequencers to identify a virus - it would just have been a bug "going round" or "the lurgi". Also life expectancy was less with fewer 80+'s (half of COVID deaths) and hospitals treated patients more conservatively, not resucitating 60+'s for instance. c90% of COVID deaths are reported as involving serious underlying conditions, that would then have seemed unexceptionable, nature's cull. Both in 2001 and 2015 there were comparable death rates from the then 'flu strain.

Still, I'm glad to be in 2020 in a Britain that can (when it puts its mind to it) magic hospitals in 9 days and whose NHS that can recover patients of 106 years from viral pneumonia. I'm still heartbroken for the young and fit that are carried off and the many brave medics of all types who are giving their lives for us.

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends"

WAO
 

scotrail158713

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You had four channels in the 1970s? Guess you were on the border between ITV regions. My cousin in the North East was similar, if he swivelled the loop aerial on his b&w portable he could switch between Tyne Tees & Yorkshire (?).

I'm not sure overall things would have been better in 1980.

Covid-19 would have devasted the mining towns and villages, indeed any town focussed on an industry that we now know the workers suffered industrial lung disease.

Smoking was still quite common in 1980 too. Again, Covid-19 going straight for the lungs. Not to mention the asthma that I and many other kids suffered from with leaded fuel, single glazed windows, a coal fire in almost every home and chimney stacks for industry - those particulates going straight for the lungs and increasing risk to Covid-19.

NHS, my word, it's easy to forget how far we've come in 40 years. Looking back then it was practically quack medicine, yes we had anti-biotics and immunisation, but no MRIs, ultrasound was very specialist, you wouldn't find an ECG machine in your local health centre and there were no blood pressure monitors for £15 "in the middle at Lidl". Oh and when you broke a thermometer it was fun to play with the mercury.

Don't forget that "simple" elements like flexible safe plastics for use in things like ventilators were still new and expensive technology in the 70s and 80s. There's a reason why we don't let children use 1980s toys!

Just think of all the people killed through hepatitis in blood products.

The 70s and 80s weren't halcyon days of good behaviour either. It's hard to forget the Yorkshire Ripper or Fred West.
Spot on. One of the most reasonable posts I’ve read recently.
 

37424

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Spot on. One of the most reasonable posts I’ve read recently.

Indeed for the record Channel 4 started Nov 82. I think we should also remember as already highlighted Medical Care and our understanding has improved a lot in the last 40 years, the treatment for a serious illness I have for instance has only been around for a few years and I suspect my prospects wouldn't be very good on the treatment of 40 years ago.


1980 was a tough time in many respects, inflation was high, Unemployment was high and going to get worse and unfortunately as a result of the virus some of the younger generation are going to feel the effects of that for the first time unemployment in the early 80's was significantly worse than 2008
 

317 forever

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In London Routemasters were still in frontline service, and regular withdrawals had not even started. This would have caused problems with proximity between the conductor and passengers, and in the absence of a conductor no member of staff to for example ring the bell to alert the driver to leave the bus stop.
 

Bletchleyite

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In London Routemasters were still in frontline service, and regular withdrawals had not even started. This would have caused problems with proximity between the conductor and passengers, and in the absence of a conductor no member of staff to for example ring the bell to alert the driver to leave the bus stop.

An option with RMs might have been passengers upstairs only, with downstairs the "conductor's office".
 

Welly

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A blonde PM in Number 10 and a sense of impending doom? Not a lot of difference between then and now! :D
 

Yew

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I don't think we could determine the DNA of the virus at that point? We'd probably be going around as normal, remarking that it had been a bad flu season.
 

LAX54

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Having to stay at home is hard enough without being able to see your friends, but luckily the invention of social media and smartphones have enabled us to continue seeing each other while we remain indoors, just spare a thought though for people who do not have access to this technology, and that would have been the case for everyone had it happened 40 years ago.

A hypothetical scenario where Covid-19 took place in 1980 would have seen it emerge at the dawn of the Thatcher era, before the miners strikes which dominated the decade. Could it have accelerated technological development including that of mobile phones? Could it have had a bigger economic impact then than it would now? Where would we be today had Covid-19 happened 40 years ago?

We would just have put it down to one of the years with a really bad flu epidemic! Social Media and all it's failings, and Rolling News with hours to cover, has made it what it is
 

PupCuff

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Well, of course, in the early 80s, the world was confronted by another epidemic. Clusters of otherwise healthy people across America, initially, were being admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia and other opportunistic conditions. Doctors didn't know what was happening, but in any case there wasn't a cure. Rather like now, it was apparent that the virus was spreading before the sufferer showed symptoms. Rather like now, the most reliable theory is that the virus spread from animal to human through blood transfer whilst capturing or butchering the animal. And rather like now, where as a result of the virus spreading heavily in China we've seen plenty of unjustified stigma against those of Chinese origin, the world looked at the demographics in which the virus was being spread, and 'gay-related immune deficiency' came to be. In real terms, it wasn't that long before we found out that AIDS, as it became formally known, was caused by HIV and that it can be controlled, and prevented, and now forty years later, we're at the stage where we even have medicine you can take that will bring your chance of contracting it to effectively zero. But that didn't stop the damage that, both at the time, and since, media sensationalism, popular prejudice and pure and simple fear had done - AIDS was seen as a gay disease and, in many cases still is, even though sexual transmission rates are equal between same and opposite sex couples.

We talk about things being a 'new normal' as we adjust to a world with COVID-19, and we had to adapt to a 'new normal' back then, too.

The unknown is the same; the fear is the same; in many cases the prejudice is the same.
 
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