| 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. |
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