[valachio]

I think if this pandemic struck in the 70s or 80s, it would have been shook off as a moderately more dangerous version of the flu, and there would have been no lockdowns or anything like that. Life would go on as normal until natural herd immunity is achieved.

[soperj]

We had smallpox for centuries, same with measles, mumps, rubella, polio, etc etc. AIDS came about in the 80s. How's that natural herd immunity for AIDS going?

You would have ended up with full hospitals everywhere and people dying in the streets, and the Delta variant way before a vaccine was ready if we didn't do lockdowns.

[whimsicalism]

I'm a strong supporter of strong measures to combat covid, but your question about AIDS is obviously disingenuous. AIDS kills almost every one who gets it (e: in the 70s - of course as a reply mentions, it is not nearly as deadly today and very few caught HIV cases progress to AIDS in the first place now), but it didn't spread very far compared to covid, so of course no herd immunity would develop.

[Schiendelman]

Your information seems out of date - AIDS is now mostly survivable and has been for perhaps a decade.

[arrrg]

That doesn’t seem plausible.

Non-medical interventions were also employed during the 1918/19 flu pandemic, also in the US. In fact, when things like school closures were initially discussed people were literally looking up old data from the 1918/19 flu pandemic to see what, if anything, we could learn from the non-medical interventions back then.

I doubt that we would have been able to create a vaccine (as quickly) in the 70s or 80s. Our knowledge about corona viruses wasn’t there yet and we also didn’t have plausible easy technological paths towards a vaccine.

So that would have sucked a lot. Really, a lot. Given that I think we would have necessarily accepted more deaths – but it would still all have been quite annoying since you really don’t want to run your hospitals at 110% all the time even if you are willing to accept all the deaths.

It’s just that now vaccines do provide a good solution with dramatically reduced deaths, hospitalizations, even (though much more limited) spread. Which makes it all the more frustrating that people aren’t taking advantage of that.

So I’m not so sure why you think that if we miraculously had an effective and safe vaccine for a novel pandemic corona virus in the 70s or 80s we there wouldn’t be mandates. Seems quite in line with US and overall Western tradition.

[nullc]

> you really don’t want to run your hospitals at 110% all the time

Presumably we would have increased hospital capacity, rather than slightly decreasing it [1][2].

[1] https://www.aha.org/statistics/fast-facts-us-hospitals - total staffed beds 919,559

[2] https://www.aha.org/statistics/2020-01-07-archived-fast-fact... - total staffed beds 931,203

[whimsicalism]

Yes, life in the developed world was still not as valuable back then.

However, covid in the 70s would have been substantially worse than the flu - a large reason covid nowadays is not deadly is due to increases in quality of care.