Quote:Patti Mulhearn Lydon, 68, doesn’t have rose-colored memories of attending Woodstock in August 1969. The rock festival, which took place over four days in Bethel, NY, mostly reminds her of being covered in mud and daydreaming about a hot shower.

She was a 17-year-old high-school student from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, when she made the trek to Max Yasgur’s farm with her boyfriend Rod. For three nights, she shared an outdoor bedroom with 300,000 other rock fans from around the country, most of whom were probably not washing their hands for the length of “Happy Birthday” — or at all.

“There was no food or water, but one of our guys cut an apple into twenty-seven slices and we all shared it,” she said. At some point, a garden hose from one of the farm’s neighbors was passed around and strangers used it as a communal source for bathing and drinking, she said.

And all of this happened during a global pandemic in which over one million people died.

H3N2 (or the “Hong Kong flu,” as it was more popularly known) was an influenza strain that the New York Times described as “one of the worst in the nation’s history.” The first case of H3N2, which evolved from the H2N2 influenza strain that caused the 1957 pandemic, was reported in mid-July 1968 in Hong Kong. By September, it had infected Marines returning to the States from the Vietnam War. By mid-December, the Hong Kong flu had arrived in all fifty states.

But schools were not shut down nationwide, other than a few dozen because of too many sick teachers. Face masks weren’t required or even common. Though Woodstock was not held during the peak months of the H3N2 pandemic (the first wave ended by early March 1969, and it didn’t flare up again until November of that year), the festival went ahead when the virus was still active and had no known cure.

“I wish they had social distancing at Woodstock,” jokes Lydon, who now lives in Delray Beach, Florida, and works as a purchasing manager for MDVIP, a network of primary care doctors. “You had to climb over people to get anywhere.”

“Life continued as normal,” said Jeffrey Tucker, the editorial director for the American Institute for Economic Research. “But as with now, no one knew for certain how deadly [the pandemic] would turn out to be. Regardless, people went on with their lives.”

Which, he said, isn’t all that surprising. “That generation approached viruses with calm, rationality and intelligence,” he said. “We left disease mitigation to medical professionals, individuals and families, rather than politics, politicians and government.”

While it’s way too soon to compare the numbers, H3N2 has so far proved deadlier than COVID-19. Between 1968 and 1970, the Hong Kong flu killed between an estimated one and four million, according to the CDC and Encyclopaedia Britannica, with US deaths exceeding 100,000. As of this writing, COVID-19 has killed more than 295,000 globally and around 83,000 in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University. But by all projections, the coronavirus will surpass H3N2’s body count even with a global shutdown.

Aside from the different reactions to H3N2 and COVID-19, the similarities between them are striking. Both viruses spread quickly and cause upper respiratory symptoms including fever, cough and shortness of breath. They infect mostly adults over 65 or those with underlying medical conditions, but could strike people of any age.

Both pandemics didn’t spare the rich and famous — Hitchcock actress Tallulah Bankhead and former CIA director Allen Dulles succumbed to H3N2, while COVID-19 has taken the lives of singer-songwriter John Prine and playwright Terrence McNally, among others. President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Humphrey both fell ill from H3N2 and recovered, as did UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson from COVID-19 last month.

Both viruses infected animals — a 4-year-old Malayan tiger at the Bronx Zoo tested positive for the coronavirus in early April, and in January 1969, the original Shamu at San Diego’s SeaWorld, along with two other killer whales named Ramu and Kilroy, contracted the Hong Kong flu.

Both pandemics brought drama to outer space: During an Apollo 8 mission in December 1968, commander Frank Borman came down with the Hong Kong flu while in orbit. And in early April, three NASA astronauts returned to Earth after seven months aboard the International Space Station, with astronaut Jessica Meir remarking that it felt like coming home “to a different planet.”

During both pandemics, horror stories abounded — from the bodies stored in refrigerated trucks in New York last month to corpses stored in subway tunnels in Germany during the H3N2 outbreak.

Those who had H3N2 and survived describe a health battle that sounds eerily familiar to COVID. “The coughing and difficulty breathing were the worst but it was the lethargy that kept me in bed,” said Jim Poling Sr., the author of “Killer Flu: The World on the Brink of a Pandemic,” who caught the virus while studying at Columbia University. “X-rays after recovery showed scarring at the bottom of my left lung.”

Renee Ward, 53, remembers her entire family contracting the virus in Greenville, NC, during Christmas of 1968. “My father got sick first, quickly followed by me and my mother,” she said. But their symptoms were mild, for the most part. “Christmas morning, I was trying to play with my new kitchen set from Santa, while my mother watched from the couch and cried because we couldn’t travel to be with my grandparents.”

Linda Murray Bullard, 60, from Chattanooga, Tenn., remembers visiting a “super” grocery store with her mom just before Thanksgiving in 1968. Days later, her mother was in bed with a fever, chills and dry cough.

“I turned 9 years old on December 5th, but because she was so ill we didn’t celebrate,” said Bullard. “I just wanted her to feel better.” Days before Christmas Eve, her 33-year-old mother went to an ER and was diagnosed with the Hong Kong flu. She died shortly after.

The global fight to stop (or at least slow down) COVID-19 has brought heavy restrictions on all aspects of public life, including restaurants, bars, weddings, funerals, churches, movie theaters and gyms. Schools have reverted to remote learning and most business now happens via Zoom. The Grand Canyon is closed, as are all Disney parks and Las Vegas casinos. Professional sports are on indefinite hold, including Wimbledon, which canceled for the first time since World War II.

How does this compare to the Hong Kong flu? Nathaniel Moir, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, said there were few precautions taken during the H3N2 pandemic other than washing hands and staying home when sick.

“It was like the pandemic hadn’t even happened if you look for it in history books,” he said. “I am still shocked at how differently people addressed — or maybe even ignored it — in 1968 compared to 2020.”

The virus rarely made front-page news. A 1968 story in the Associated Press warned that deaths caused by the Hong Kong flu “more than doubled across the nation in the third week of December.” But the story was buried on page 24. The New York Post didn’t publish any stories about the pandemic in 1968, and in 1969, coverage was mostly minor, like reports of newly married couples delaying honeymoons because of the virus and the Yonkers police force calling in sick with the Hong Kong flu during wage negotiations.

A vaccine was soon developed — in August 1969, not long after Woodstock — but the news of a cure didn’t get much media attention either.

It may seem like the world responded to the 1968 pandemic with a shrug of indifference, but the different approaches may be down to a generational divide, said Poling. In 1968, “we were confident with all the advances in medicine. Measles, mumps, chickenpox, scarlet fever and polio all had been brought under control,” he said.

Tucker remembers being taught as a child of the ’60s that “getting viruses ultimately strengthened one’s immune system. One of my most vivid memories is of a chickenpox party. The idea was that you should get it and get it over with when you are young.”

Even with those relaxed ideas about viruses, the Hong Kong flu caught the world by surprise. It was different from previous pandemics because of how fast it spread, thanks largely to increased international air travel.

Much of our current thinking about infectious diseases in the modern era changed because of the SARS outbreak of 2003, which “scared the hell out of many people,” said Poling. “It’s the first time I recall people wearing masks and trying to distance themselves from others, particularly in situations where someone might cough or sneeze.”

The idea that a pandemic could be controlled with social distancing and public lockdowns is a relatively new one, said Tucker. It was first suggested in a 2006 study by New Mexico scientist Robert J. Glass, who got the idea from his 14-year-old daughter’s science project.

“Two government doctors, not even epidemiologists” — Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, who worked for the Bush administration — “hatched the idea [of using government-enforced social distancing] and hoped to try it out on the next virus.” We are in effect, Tucker said, part of a grand social experiment.

But the differences between how the world responded to two pandemics, separated by 50 years, is more complicated than any single explanation.

“If I were 48 in 1968, I would have most likely served in World War II,” said Moir. “I would have had a little brother who served in Korea, and possibly might have a son or daughter fighting in Vietnam.” Death, he said, was a bigger and in some ways more accepted part of American life.

The Hong Kong flu also arrived in a particularly volatile moment in history. There was the race to land a man on the moon and political assassinations and sexual liberation and the civil-rights movement. Without 24/7 news coverage and social media vying for our attention, a new strain of flu could hardly compete for the public’s attention.

But, even if people in 1968 had been told to stay home, it’s unlikely they would’ve protested, Moir said. Dining out, for instance, was a rare indulgence for most American families then. Today, “we spend as much eating out as we do preparing food at home,” Moir said. A 2013 study by market research firm NPD Group found that between the mid-1960s to the late 2000s, middle-income households went from eating at home 92 percent of the time to 69 percent of the time.

In 2020, we feel that being denied music festivals and restaurants is an egregious attack on our liberty. “A big part of our freakout over COVID-19 is a reaction to everything in this country that we’ve taken for granted,” Moir said. “When it’s taken away, we lose our minds.”

It’s a point echoed by Lydon. Her best memories of that wild weekend aren’t the sweaty crowds or the music — Jimi Hendrix’s electric guitar scared the “begeebers” out of her, she said — but the quiet moments afterwards back at a parent’s house in New Jersey.

“I ate the best grilled-cheese sandwich and drank the best lemonade,” she said. And “I took the best shower I ever remember.”

Link

I'm having a difficult time weighing in here because Joy Behar & The View are off today.

(05-17-2020 11:55 AM)CrimsonPhantom Wrote:  

Quote:Patti Mulhearn Lydon, 68, doesn’t have rose-colored memories of attending Woodstock in August 1969. The rock festival, which took place over four days in Bethel, NY, mostly reminds her of being covered in mud and daydreaming about a hot shower.

She was a 17-year-old high-school student from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, when she made the trek to Max Yasgur’s farm with her boyfriend Rod. For three nights, she shared an outdoor bedroom with 300,000 other rock fans from around the country, most of whom were probably not washing their hands for the length of “Happy Birthday” — or at all.

“There was no food or water, but one of our guys cut an apple into twenty-seven slices and we all shared it,” she said. At some point, a garden hose from one of the farm’s neighbors was passed around and strangers used it as a communal source for bathing and drinking, she said.

And all of this happened during a global pandemic in which over one million people died.

H3N2 (or the “Hong Kong flu,” as it was more popularly known) was an influenza strain that the New York Times described as “one of the worst in the nation’s history.” The first case of H3N2, which evolved from the H2N2 influenza strain that caused the 1957 pandemic, was reported in mid-July 1968 in Hong Kong. By September, it had infected Marines returning to the States from the Vietnam War. By mid-December, the Hong Kong flu had arrived in all fifty states.

But schools were not shut down nationwide, other than a few dozen because of too many sick teachers. Face masks weren’t required or even common. Though Woodstock was not held during the peak months of the H3N2 pandemic (the first wave ended by early March 1969, and it didn’t flare up again until November of that year), the festival went ahead when the virus was still active and had no known cure.

“I wish they had social distancing at Woodstock,” jokes Lydon, who now lives in Delray Beach, Florida, and works as a purchasing manager for MDVIP, a network of primary care doctors. “You had to climb over people to get anywhere.”

“Life continued as normal,” said Jeffrey Tucker, the editorial director for the American Institute for Economic Research. “But as with now, no one knew for certain how deadly [the pandemic] would turn out to be. Regardless, people went on with their lives.”

Which, he said, isn’t all that surprising. “That generation approached viruses with calm, rationality and intelligence,” he said. “We left disease mitigation to medical professionals, individuals and families, rather than politics, politicians and government.”

While it’s way too soon to compare the numbers, H3N2 has so far proved deadlier than COVID-19. Between 1968 and 1970, the Hong Kong flu killed between an estimated one and four million, according to the CDC and Encyclopaedia Britannica, with US deaths exceeding 100,000. As of this writing, COVID-19 has killed more than 295,000 globally and around 83,000 in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University. But by all projections, the coronavirus will surpass H3N2’s body count even with a global shutdown.

Aside from the different reactions to H3N2 and COVID-19, the similarities between them are striking. Both viruses spread quickly and cause upper respiratory symptoms including fever, cough and shortness of breath. They infect mostly adults over 65 or those with underlying medical conditions, but could strike people of any age.

Both pandemics didn’t spare the rich and famous — Hitchcock actress Tallulah Bankhead and former CIA director Allen Dulles succumbed to H3N2, while COVID-19 has taken the lives of singer-songwriter John Prine and playwright Terrence McNally, among others. President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Humphrey both fell ill from H3N2 and recovered, as did UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson from COVID-19 last month.

Both viruses infected animals — a 4-year-old Malayan tiger at the Bronx Zoo tested positive for the coronavirus in early April, and in January 1969, the original Shamu at San Diego’s SeaWorld, along with two other killer whales named Ramu and Kilroy, contracted the Hong Kong flu.

Both pandemics brought drama to outer space: During an Apollo 8 mission in December 1968, commander Frank Borman came down with the Hong Kong flu while in orbit. And in early April, three NASA astronauts returned to Earth after seven months aboard the International Space Station, with astronaut Jessica Meir remarking that it felt like coming home “to a different planet.”

During both pandemics, horror stories abounded — from the bodies stored in refrigerated trucks in New York last month to corpses stored in subway tunnels in Germany during the H3N2 outbreak.

Those who had H3N2 and survived describe a health battle that sounds eerily familiar to COVID. “The coughing and difficulty breathing were the worst but it was the lethargy that kept me in bed,” said Jim Poling Sr., the author of “Killer Flu: The World on the Brink of a Pandemic,” who caught the virus while studying at Columbia University. “X-rays after recovery showed scarring at the bottom of my left lung.”

Renee Ward, 53, remembers her entire family contracting the virus in Greenville, NC, during Christmas of 1968. “My father got sick first, quickly followed by me and my mother,” she said. But their symptoms were mild, for the most part. “Christmas morning, I was trying to play with my new kitchen set from Santa, while my mother watched from the couch and cried because we couldn’t travel to be with my grandparents.”

Linda Murray Bullard, 60, from Chattanooga, Tenn., remembers visiting a “super” grocery store with her mom just before Thanksgiving in 1968. Days later, her mother was in bed with a fever, chills and dry cough.

“I turned 9 years old on December 5th, but because she was so ill we didn’t celebrate,” said Bullard. “I just wanted her to feel better.” Days before Christmas Eve, her 33-year-old mother went to an ER and was diagnosed with the Hong Kong flu. She died shortly after.

The global fight to stop (or at least slow down) COVID-19 has brought heavy restrictions on all aspects of public life, including restaurants, bars, weddings, funerals, churches, movie theaters and gyms. Schools have reverted to remote learning and most business now happens via Zoom. The Grand Canyon is closed, as are all Disney parks and Las Vegas casinos. Professional sports are on indefinite hold, including Wimbledon, which canceled for the first time since World War II.

How does this compare to the Hong Kong flu? Nathaniel Moir, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, said there were few precautions taken during the H3N2 pandemic other than washing hands and staying home when sick.

“It was like the pandemic hadn’t even happened if you look for it in history books,” he said. “I am still shocked at how differently people addressed — or maybe even ignored it — in 1968 compared to 2020.”

The virus rarely made front-page news. A 1968 story in the Associated Press warned that deaths caused by the Hong Kong flu “more than doubled across the nation in the third week of December.” But the story was buried on page 24. The New York Post didn’t publish any stories about the pandemic in 1968, and in 1969, coverage was mostly minor, like reports of newly married couples delaying honeymoons because of the virus and the Yonkers police force calling in sick with the Hong Kong flu during wage negotiations.

A vaccine was soon developed — in August 1969, not long after Woodstock — but the news of a cure didn’t get much media attention either.

It may seem like the world responded to the 1968 pandemic with a shrug of indifference, but the different approaches may be down to a generational divide, said Poling. In 1968, “we were confident with all the advances in medicine. Measles, mumps, chickenpox, scarlet fever and polio all had been brought under control,” he said.

Tucker remembers being taught as a child of the ’60s that “getting viruses ultimately strengthened one’s immune system. One of my most vivid memories is of a chickenpox party. The idea was that you should get it and get it over with when you are young.”

Even with those relaxed ideas about viruses, the Hong Kong flu caught the world by surprise. It was different from previous pandemics because of how fast it spread, thanks largely to increased international air travel.

Much of our current thinking about infectious diseases in the modern era changed because of the SARS outbreak of 2003, which “scared the hell out of many people,” said Poling. “It’s the first time I recall people wearing masks and trying to distance themselves from others, particularly in situations where someone might cough or sneeze.”

The idea that a pandemic could be controlled with social distancing and public lockdowns is a relatively new one, said Tucker. It was first suggested in a 2006 study by New Mexico scientist Robert J. Glass, who got the idea from his 14-year-old daughter’s science project.

“Two government doctors, not even epidemiologists” — Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, who worked for the Bush administration — “hatched the idea [of using government-enforced social distancing] and hoped to try it out on the next virus.” We are in effect, Tucker said, part of a grand social experiment.

But the differences between how the world responded to two pandemics, separated by 50 years, is more complicated than any single explanation.

“If I were 48 in 1968, I would have most likely served in World War II,” said Moir. “I would have had a little brother who served in Korea, and possibly might have a son or daughter fighting in Vietnam.” Death, he said, was a bigger and in some ways more accepted part of American life.

The Hong Kong flu also arrived in a particularly volatile moment in history. There was the race to land a man on the moon and political assassinations and sexual liberation and the civil-rights movement. Without 24/7 news coverage and social media vying for our attention, a new strain of flu could hardly compete for the public’s attention.

But, even if people in 1968 had been told to stay home, it’s unlikely they would’ve protested, Moir said. Dining out, for instance, was a rare indulgence for most American families then. Today, “we spend as much eating out as we do preparing food at home,” Moir said. A 2013 study by market research firm NPD Group found that between the mid-1960s to the late 2000s, middle-income households went from eating at home 92 percent of the time to 69 percent of the time.

In 2020, we feel that being denied music festivals and restaurants is an egregious attack on our liberty. “A big part of our freakout over COVID-19 is a reaction to everything in this country that we’ve taken for granted,” Moir said. “When it’s taken away, we lose our minds.”

It’s a point echoed by Lydon. Her best memories of that wild weekend aren’t the sweaty crowds or the music — Jimi Hendrix’s electric guitar scared the “begeebers” out of her, she said — but the quiet moments afterwards back at a parent’s house in New Jersey.

“I ate the best grilled-cheese sandwich and drank the best lemonade,” she said. And “I took the best shower I ever remember.”

Link

I'm having a difficult time weighing in here because Joy Behar & The View are off today.

It actually got started in '68 and it is one strain that I had, but I was young and it put me in bed for the better part of a week. It was a "Swine Flu" variant. The difference between it and the Corona virus is communicability. This virus lives so much longer on open surfaces and touch becomes a much easier pathway to catching it. With most strains of influenza a cough or sneeze or some other immediate spontaneous contact is what makes you catch it. You didn't have to Lysol your mail because the virus could live on paper for up to 24 hours or a bit longer. You didn't have to clean your door handles because it lived on metal surfaces for 3 days.

Still, I agree mostly with the viewpoint of the author. Social distancing because of the mode of transmission is effective. Gloving and masking helps keep an asymptomatic person from spreading it. Shutting down our world seems to me to be extreme. The masks unlike what some here think are not to keep you from getting it. They are to inhibit you from spreading it unknowingly.

No social media

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk

(05-17-2020 12:16 PM)fsquid Wrote:  No social media

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk

Yes which = no fake videos out of China.

(05-17-2020 01:10 PM)SuperFlyBCat Wrote:  

(05-17-2020 12:16 PM)fsquid Wrote:  No social media

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk

Yes which = no fake videos out of China.

True also how many who went to Woodstock read a paper or watched the news?

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk

(05-17-2020 12:15 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(05-17-2020 11:55 AM)CrimsonPhantom Wrote:  

Quote:Patti Mulhearn Lydon, 68, doesn’t have rose-colored memories of attending Woodstock in August 1969. The rock festival, which took place over four days in Bethel, NY, mostly reminds her of being covered in mud and daydreaming about a hot shower.

She was a 17-year-old high-school student from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, when she made the trek to Max Yasgur’s farm with her boyfriend Rod. For three nights, she shared an outdoor bedroom with 300,000 other rock fans from around the country, most of whom were probably not washing their hands for the length of “Happy Birthday” — or at all.

“There was no food or water, but one of our guys cut an apple into twenty-seven slices and we all shared it,” she said. At some point, a garden hose from one of the farm’s neighbors was passed around and strangers used it as a communal source for bathing and drinking, she said.

And all of this happened during a global pandemic in which over one million people died.

H3N2 (or the “Hong Kong flu,” as it was more popularly known) was an influenza strain that the New York Times described as “one of the worst in the nation’s history.” The first case of H3N2, which evolved from the H2N2 influenza strain that caused the 1957 pandemic, was reported in mid-July 1968 in Hong Kong. By September, it had infected Marines returning to the States from the Vietnam War. By mid-December, the Hong Kong flu had arrived in all fifty states.

But schools were not shut down nationwide, other than a few dozen because of too many sick teachers. Face masks weren’t required or even common. Though Woodstock was not held during the peak months of the H3N2 pandemic (the first wave ended by early March 1969, and it didn’t flare up again until November of that year), the festival went ahead when the virus was still active and had no known cure.

“I wish they had social distancing at Woodstock,” jokes Lydon, who now lives in Delray Beach, Florida, and works as a purchasing manager for MDVIP, a network of primary care doctors. “You had to climb over people to get anywhere.”

“Life continued as normal,” said Jeffrey Tucker, the editorial director for the American Institute for Economic Research. “But as with now, no one knew for certain how deadly [the pandemic] would turn out to be. Regardless, people went on with their lives.”

Which, he said, isn’t all that surprising. “That generation approached viruses with calm, rationality and intelligence,” he said. “We left disease mitigation to medical professionals, individuals and families, rather than politics, politicians and government.”

While it’s way too soon to compare the numbers, H3N2 has so far proved deadlier than COVID-19. Between 1968 and 1970, the Hong Kong flu killed between an estimated one and four million, according to the CDC and Encyclopaedia Britannica, with US deaths exceeding 100,000. As of this writing, COVID-19 has killed more than 295,000 globally and around 83,000 in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University. But by all projections, the coronavirus will surpass H3N2’s body count even with a global shutdown.

Aside from the different reactions to H3N2 and COVID-19, the similarities between them are striking. Both viruses spread quickly and cause upper respiratory symptoms including fever, cough and shortness of breath. They infect mostly adults over 65 or those with underlying medical conditions, but could strike people of any age.

Both pandemics didn’t spare the rich and famous — Hitchcock actress Tallulah Bankhead and former CIA director Allen Dulles succumbed to H3N2, while COVID-19 has taken the lives of singer-songwriter John Prine and playwright Terrence McNally, among others. President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Humphrey both fell ill from H3N2 and recovered, as did UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson from COVID-19 last month.

Both viruses infected animals — a 4-year-old Malayan tiger at the Bronx Zoo tested positive for the coronavirus in early April, and in January 1969, the original Shamu at San Diego’s SeaWorld, along with two other killer whales named Ramu and Kilroy, contracted the Hong Kong flu.

Both pandemics brought drama to outer space: During an Apollo 8 mission in December 1968, commander Frank Borman came down with the Hong Kong flu while in orbit. And in early April, three NASA astronauts returned to Earth after seven months aboard the International Space Station, with astronaut Jessica Meir remarking that it felt like coming home “to a different planet.”

During both pandemics, horror stories abounded — from the bodies stored in refrigerated trucks in New York last month to corpses stored in subway tunnels in Germany during the H3N2 outbreak.

Those who had H3N2 and survived describe a health battle that sounds eerily familiar to COVID. “The coughing and difficulty breathing were the worst but it was the lethargy that kept me in bed,” said Jim Poling Sr., the author of “Killer Flu: The World on the Brink of a Pandemic,” who caught the virus while studying at Columbia University. “X-rays after recovery showed scarring at the bottom of my left lung.”

Renee Ward, 53, remembers her entire family contracting the virus in Greenville, NC, during Christmas of 1968. “My father got sick first, quickly followed by me and my mother,” she said. But their symptoms were mild, for the most part. “Christmas morning, I was trying to play with my new kitchen set from Santa, while my mother watched from the couch and cried because we couldn’t travel to be with my grandparents.”

Linda Murray Bullard, 60, from Chattanooga, Tenn., remembers visiting a “super” grocery store with her mom just before Thanksgiving in 1968. Days later, her mother was in bed with a fever, chills and dry cough.

“I turned 9 years old on December 5th, but because she was so ill we didn’t celebrate,” said Bullard. “I just wanted her to feel better.” Days before Christmas Eve, her 33-year-old mother went to an ER and was diagnosed with the Hong Kong flu. She died shortly after.

The global fight to stop (or at least slow down) COVID-19 has brought heavy restrictions on all aspects of public life, including restaurants, bars, weddings, funerals, churches, movie theaters and gyms. Schools have reverted to remote learning and most business now happens via Zoom. The Grand Canyon is closed, as are all Disney parks and Las Vegas casinos. Professional sports are on indefinite hold, including Wimbledon, which canceled for the first time since World War II.

How does this compare to the Hong Kong flu? Nathaniel Moir, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, said there were few precautions taken during the H3N2 pandemic other than washing hands and staying home when sick.

“It was like the pandemic hadn’t even happened if you look for it in history books,” he said. “I am still shocked at how differently people addressed — or maybe even ignored it — in 1968 compared to 2020.”

The virus rarely made front-page news. A 1968 story in the Associated Press warned that deaths caused by the Hong Kong flu “more than doubled across the nation in the third week of December.” But the story was buried on page 24. The New York Post didn’t publish any stories about the pandemic in 1968, and in 1969, coverage was mostly minor, like reports of newly married couples delaying honeymoons because of the virus and the Yonkers police force calling in sick with the Hong Kong flu during wage negotiations.

A vaccine was soon developed — in August 1969, not long after Woodstock — but the news of a cure didn’t get much media attention either.

It may seem like the world responded to the 1968 pandemic with a shrug of indifference, but the different approaches may be down to a generational divide, said Poling. In 1968, “we were confident with all the advances in medicine. Measles, mumps, chickenpox, scarlet fever and polio all had been brought under control,” he said.

Tucker remembers being taught as a child of the ’60s that “getting viruses ultimately strengthened one’s immune system. One of my most vivid memories is of a chickenpox party. The idea was that you should get it and get it over with when you are young.”

Even with those relaxed ideas about viruses, the Hong Kong flu caught the world by surprise. It was different from previous pandemics because of how fast it spread, thanks largely to increased international air travel.

Much of our current thinking about infectious diseases in the modern era changed because of the SARS outbreak of 2003, which “scared the hell out of many people,” said Poling. “It’s the first time I recall people wearing masks and trying to distance themselves from others, particularly in situations where someone might cough or sneeze.”

The idea that a pandemic could be controlled with social distancing and public lockdowns is a relatively new one, said Tucker. It was first suggested in a 2006 study by New Mexico scientist Robert J. Glass, who got the idea from his 14-year-old daughter’s science project.

“Two government doctors, not even epidemiologists” — Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, who worked for the Bush administration — “hatched the idea [of using government-enforced social distancing] and hoped to try it out on the next virus.” We are in effect, Tucker said, part of a grand social experiment.

But the differences between how the world responded to two pandemics, separated by 50 years, is more complicated than any single explanation.

“If I were 48 in 1968, I would have most likely served in World War II,” said Moir. “I would have had a little brother who served in Korea, and possibly might have a son or daughter fighting in Vietnam.” Death, he said, was a bigger and in some ways more accepted part of American life.

The Hong Kong flu also arrived in a particularly volatile moment in history. There was the race to land a man on the moon and political assassinations and sexual liberation and the civil-rights movement. Without 24/7 news coverage and social media vying for our attention, a new strain of flu could hardly compete for the public’s attention.

But, even if people in 1968 had been told to stay home, it’s unlikely they would’ve protested, Moir said. Dining out, for instance, was a rare indulgence for most American families then. Today, “we spend as much eating out as we do preparing food at home,” Moir said. A 2013 study by market research firm NPD Group found that between the mid-1960s to the late 2000s, middle-income households went from eating at home 92 percent of the time to 69 percent of the time.

In 2020, we feel that being denied music festivals and restaurants is an egregious attack on our liberty. “A big part of our freakout over COVID-19 is a reaction to everything in this country that we’ve taken for granted,” Moir said. “When it’s taken away, we lose our minds.”

It’s a point echoed by Lydon. Her best memories of that wild weekend aren’t the sweaty crowds or the music — Jimi Hendrix’s electric guitar scared the “begeebers” out of her, she said — but the quiet moments afterwards back at a parent’s house in New Jersey.

“I ate the best grilled-cheese sandwich and drank the best lemonade,” she said. And “I took the best shower I ever remember.”

Link

I'm having a difficult time weighing in here because Joy Behar & The View are off today.

It actually got started in '68 and it is one strain that I had, but I was young and it put me in bed for the better part of a week. It was a "Swine Flu" variant. The difference between it and the Corona virus is communicability. This virus lives so much longer on open surfaces and touch becomes a much easier pathway to catching it. With most strains of influenza a cough or sneeze or some other immediate spontaneous contact is what makes you catch it. You didn't have to Lysol your mail because the virus could live on paper for up to 24 hours or a bit longer. You didn't have to clean your door handles because it lived on metal surfaces for 3 days.

Still, I agree mostly with the viewpoint of the author. Social distancing because of the mode of transmission is effective. Gloving and masking helps keep an asymptomatic person from spreading it. Shutting down our world seems to me to be extreme. The masks unlike what some here think are not to keep you from getting it. They are to inhibit you from spreading it unknowingly.

I don't remember 69 or even hearing about it until just now. 57-58, the Asian flue, was supposedly the bad one. It killed 2 million worldwide. According to wiki, it killed between 70 and 116k in the US.

Overreaction or not, we are at 90,000+ US deaths within 3 months (or so) vs. 100,000 over multiple years. So I think it's safe to say this is worse, although of course we have more people living here now.

(05-17-2020 01:45 PM)wmubroncopilot Wrote:  Overreaction or not, we are at 90,000+ US deaths within 3 months (or so) vs. 100,000 over multiple years. So I think it's safe to say this is worse, although of course we have more people living here now.

We're at 332 million now vs. 203 in 1970 and 179 in 1960. So we are nearly double the population of 1960. Good chance the previous one was worse.

(05-17-2020 01:50 PM)bullet Wrote:  

(05-17-2020 01:45 PM)wmubroncopilot Wrote:  Overreaction or not, we are at 90,000+ US deaths within 3 months (or so) vs. 100,000 over multiple years. So I think it's safe to say this is worse, although of course we have more people living here now.

We're at 332 million now vs. 203 in 1970 and 179 in 1960. So we are nearly double the population of 1960. Good chance the previous one was worse.

I would be happily surprised if that were true. The main part of the late 60s pandemic took place over 2.5+ years. I hope this one is considerably shorter but I'm not holding my breath.

(05-17-2020 12:16 PM)fsquid Wrote:  No social media

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk

XACLY!

toss in collusion within leadershite ranc0nteurs, and it becomes 'steering'...

(05-17-2020 01:43 PM)bullet Wrote:  

(05-17-2020 12:15 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(05-17-2020 11:55 AM)CrimsonPhantom Wrote:  

Quote:Patti Mulhearn Lydon, 68, doesn’t have rose-colored memories of attending Woodstock in August 1969. The rock festival, which took place over four days in Bethel, NY, mostly reminds her of being covered in mud and daydreaming about a hot shower.

She was a 17-year-old high-school student from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, when she made the trek to Max Yasgur’s farm with her boyfriend Rod. For three nights, she shared an outdoor bedroom with 300,000 other rock fans from around the country, most of whom were probably not washing their hands for the length of “Happy Birthday” — or at all.

“There was no food or water, but one of our guys cut an apple into twenty-seven slices and we all shared it,” she said. At some point, a garden hose from one of the farm’s neighbors was passed around and strangers used it as a communal source for bathing and drinking, she said.

And all of this happened during a global pandemic in which over one million people died.

H3N2 (or the “Hong Kong flu,” as it was more popularly known) was an influenza strain that the New York Times described as “one of the worst in the nation’s history.” The first case of H3N2, which evolved from the H2N2 influenza strain that caused the 1957 pandemic, was reported in mid-July 1968 in Hong Kong. By September, it had infected Marines returning to the States from the Vietnam War. By mid-December, the Hong Kong flu had arrived in all fifty states.

But schools were not shut down nationwide, other than a few dozen because of too many sick teachers. Face masks weren’t required or even common. Though Woodstock was not held during the peak months of the H3N2 pandemic (the first wave ended by early March 1969, and it didn’t flare up again until November of that year), the festival went ahead when the virus was still active and had no known cure.

“I wish they had social distancing at Woodstock,” jokes Lydon, who now lives in Delray Beach, Florida, and works as a purchasing manager for MDVIP, a network of primary care doctors. “You had to climb over people to get anywhere.”

“Life continued as normal,” said Jeffrey Tucker, the editorial director for the American Institute for Economic Research. “But as with now, no one knew for certain how deadly [the pandemic] would turn out to be. Regardless, people went on with their lives.”

Which, he said, isn’t all that surprising. “That generation approached viruses with calm, rationality and intelligence,” he said. “We left disease mitigation to medical professionals, individuals and families, rather than politics, politicians and government.”

While it’s way too soon to compare the numbers, H3N2 has so far proved deadlier than COVID-19. Between 1968 and 1970, the Hong Kong flu killed between an estimated one and four million, according to the CDC and Encyclopaedia Britannica, with US deaths exceeding 100,000. As of this writing, COVID-19 has killed more than 295,000 globally and around 83,000 in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University. But by all projections, the coronavirus will surpass H3N2’s body count even with a global shutdown.

Aside from the different reactions to H3N2 and COVID-19, the similarities between them are striking. Both viruses spread quickly and cause upper respiratory symptoms including fever, cough and shortness of breath. They infect mostly adults over 65 or those with underlying medical conditions, but could strike people of any age.

Both pandemics didn’t spare the rich and famous — Hitchcock actress Tallulah Bankhead and former CIA director Allen Dulles succumbed to H3N2, while COVID-19 has taken the lives of singer-songwriter John Prine and playwright Terrence McNally, among others. President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Humphrey both fell ill from H3N2 and recovered, as did UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson from COVID-19 last month.

Both viruses infected animals — a 4-year-old Malayan tiger at the Bronx Zoo tested positive for the coronavirus in early April, and in January 1969, the original Shamu at San Diego’s SeaWorld, along with two other killer whales named Ramu and Kilroy, contracted the Hong Kong flu.

Both pandemics brought drama to outer space: During an Apollo 8 mission in December 1968, commander Frank Borman came down with the Hong Kong flu while in orbit. And in early April, three NASA astronauts returned to Earth after seven months aboard the International Space Station, with astronaut Jessica Meir remarking that it felt like coming home “to a different planet.”

During both pandemics, horror stories abounded — from the bodies stored in refrigerated trucks in New York last month to corpses stored in subway tunnels in Germany during the H3N2 outbreak.

Those who had H3N2 and survived describe a health battle that sounds eerily familiar to COVID. “The coughing and difficulty breathing were the worst but it was the lethargy that kept me in bed,” said Jim Poling Sr., the author of “Killer Flu: The World on the Brink of a Pandemic,” who caught the virus while studying at Columbia University. “X-rays after recovery showed scarring at the bottom of my left lung.”

Renee Ward, 53, remembers her entire family contracting the virus in Greenville, NC, during Christmas of 1968. “My father got sick first, quickly followed by me and my mother,” she said. But their symptoms were mild, for the most part. “Christmas morning, I was trying to play with my new kitchen set from Santa, while my mother watched from the couch and cried because we couldn’t travel to be with my grandparents.”

Linda Murray Bullard, 60, from Chattanooga, Tenn., remembers visiting a “super” grocery store with her mom just before Thanksgiving in 1968. Days later, her mother was in bed with a fever, chills and dry cough.

“I turned 9 years old on December 5th, but because she was so ill we didn’t celebrate,” said Bullard. “I just wanted her to feel better.” Days before Christmas Eve, her 33-year-old mother went to an ER and was diagnosed with the Hong Kong flu. She died shortly after.

The global fight to stop (or at least slow down) COVID-19 has brought heavy restrictions on all aspects of public life, including restaurants, bars, weddings, funerals, churches, movie theaters and gyms. Schools have reverted to remote learning and most business now happens via Zoom. The Grand Canyon is closed, as are all Disney parks and Las Vegas casinos. Professional sports are on indefinite hold, including Wimbledon, which canceled for the first time since World War II.

How does this compare to the Hong Kong flu? Nathaniel Moir, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, said there were few precautions taken during the H3N2 pandemic other than washing hands and staying home when sick.

“It was like the pandemic hadn’t even happened if you look for it in history books,” he said. “I am still shocked at how differently people addressed — or maybe even ignored it — in 1968 compared to 2020.”

The virus rarely made front-page news. A 1968 story in the Associated Press warned that deaths caused by the Hong Kong flu “more than doubled across the nation in the third week of December.” But the story was buried on page 24. The New York Post didn’t publish any stories about the pandemic in 1968, and in 1969, coverage was mostly minor, like reports of newly married couples delaying honeymoons because of the virus and the Yonkers police force calling in sick with the Hong Kong flu during wage negotiations.

A vaccine was soon developed — in August 1969, not long after Woodstock — but the news of a cure didn’t get much media attention either.

It may seem like the world responded to the 1968 pandemic with a shrug of indifference, but the different approaches may be down to a generational divide, said Poling. In 1968, “we were confident with all the advances in medicine. Measles, mumps, chickenpox, scarlet fever and polio all had been brought under control,” he said.

Tucker remembers being taught as a child of the ’60s that “getting viruses ultimately strengthened one’s immune system. One of my most vivid memories is of a chickenpox party. The idea was that you should get it and get it over with when you are young.”

Even with those relaxed ideas about viruses, the Hong Kong flu caught the world by surprise. It was different from previous pandemics because of how fast it spread, thanks largely to increased international air travel.

Much of our current thinking about infectious diseases in the modern era changed because of the SARS outbreak of 2003, which “scared the hell out of many people,” said Poling. “It’s the first time I recall people wearing masks and trying to distance themselves from others, particularly in situations where someone might cough or sneeze.”

The idea that a pandemic could be controlled with social distancing and public lockdowns is a relatively new one, said Tucker. It was first suggested in a 2006 study by New Mexico scientist Robert J. Glass, who got the idea from his 14-year-old daughter’s science project.

“Two government doctors, not even epidemiologists” — Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, who worked for the Bush administration — “hatched the idea [of using government-enforced social distancing] and hoped to try it out on the next virus.” We are in effect, Tucker said, part of a grand social experiment.

But the differences between how the world responded to two pandemics, separated by 50 years, is more complicated than any single explanation.

“If I were 48 in 1968, I would have most likely served in World War II,” said Moir. “I would have had a little brother who served in Korea, and possibly might have a son or daughter fighting in Vietnam.” Death, he said, was a bigger and in some ways more accepted part of American life.

The Hong Kong flu also arrived in a particularly volatile moment in history. There was the race to land a man on the moon and political assassinations and sexual liberation and the civil-rights movement. Without 24/7 news coverage and social media vying for our attention, a new strain of flu could hardly compete for the public’s attention.

But, even if people in 1968 had been told to stay home, it’s unlikely they would’ve protested, Moir said. Dining out, for instance, was a rare indulgence for most American families then. Today, “we spend as much eating out as we do preparing food at home,” Moir said. A 2013 study by market research firm NPD Group found that between the mid-1960s to the late 2000s, middle-income households went from eating at home 92 percent of the time to 69 percent of the time.

In 2020, we feel that being denied music festivals and restaurants is an egregious attack on our liberty. “A big part of our freakout over COVID-19 is a reaction to everything in this country that we’ve taken for granted,” Moir said. “When it’s taken away, we lose our minds.”

It’s a point echoed by Lydon. Her best memories of that wild weekend aren’t the sweaty crowds or the music — Jimi Hendrix’s electric guitar scared the “begeebers” out of her, she said — but the quiet moments afterwards back at a parent’s house in New Jersey.

“I ate the best grilled-cheese sandwich and drank the best lemonade,” she said. And “I took the best shower I ever remember.”

Link

I'm having a difficult time weighing in here because Joy Behar & The View are off today.

It actually got started in '68 and it is one strain that I had, but I was young and it put me in bed for the better part of a week. It was a "Swine Flu" variant. The difference between it and the Corona virus is communicability. This virus lives so much longer on open surfaces and touch becomes a much easier pathway to catching it. With most strains of influenza a cough or sneeze or some other immediate spontaneous contact is what makes you catch it. You didn't have to Lysol your mail because the virus could live on paper for up to 24 hours or a bit longer. You didn't have to clean your door handles because it lived on metal surfaces for 3 days.

Still, I agree mostly with the viewpoint of the author. Social distancing because of the mode of transmission is effective. Gloving and masking helps keep an asymptomatic person from spreading it. Shutting down our world seems to me to be extreme. The masks unlike what some here think are not to keep you from getting it. They are to inhibit you from spreading it unknowingly.

I don't remember 69 or even hearing about it until just now. 57-58, the Asian flue, was supposedly the bad one. It killed 2 million worldwide. According to wiki, it killed between 70 and 116k in the US.

Bullet, when the nation is mired in Viet Nam, in the aftermath of the Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations, and going through an election year, of course you aren't going to hear as much about it.

1957 to 58 were the middle of the lame Duck Eisenhower era, Korea had ended, Viet Nam had not formally started for the U.S. and the only thing worse than the flue was a thyroid cancer epidemic which at the time nobody had yet connected to above ground nuclear testing and the radiation absorbed in the wheat crop of the Midwest and ingested by dairy cows and transmitted to people through food. With Chernobyl that was proven to be true again as the drift pattern across the U.S. saw a spike in thyroid cancers.

But face it brother we live now in a hysterical world where everything is overreacted to and politicians react to look responsible to the several generations of sheltered nanny staters who want Big Government to solve life's crises.

My old man always said life is roller coaster ride. From the moment you are born you are being cranked up the hill to the big drop and you had two choices. You could raise your arms, scream your head off, and enjoy the ride, or you could puke all over the guys in the car behind you. But either way the ride would end just like life.

We have a society today that thinks they are entitled to long life, deny death to the point of no longer having bodies present at funerals, but rather tapes and films of the them as alive, which totally misses the point of a funeral which is to accept the death, grieve, and move on. They refuse to face death anywhere but in a video game.

People die. And sometimes for no apparent reason. We lost my wife's sister when she was 32. She had a berry aneurism in the brain and never knew it. When it popped the Doctor said it was over with in less than a minute and she likely wasn't conscious after a few seconds. My grandparents lost a child to leukemia when he was 5. We kill far more on our highways annually (except that has dropped dramatically with quarantine) but we enjoy our freedom so accept the risk. And that is the essence of freedom. When anyone accepts that they are mortal and quits worrying about everything that could kill them they are free to enjoy the life they have. All we can do is take care of ourselves physically, stay away from stupid people, and enjoy our lives. There are no guarantees. A small meteor could come through my roof and kill me in bed and there isn't a thing I can do about it. Illness happens naturally and often enough. What our attentions should be on is the deliberate act behind this one. People will die, but China should answer for it too!

Folks should just be damned glad it's not 1917, and their kids aren't being ordered over the top to be mowed down my Maxim guns, to have gangrene kill them from trench foot, and rats eat their bodies, and cholera to sweep through them like a Biblical plague, and have to face the awful death of mustard gas. The deadliest flu ever known to man was just an annoyance because of all of the other suffering.

The WWII generation faced the great depression and 5 years of separation from loved ones with death tugging on them daily wherever they were fighting.

These last 30 years we've raised children who have never faced death, never faced risk, and raised them to think they are owed both happiness and long life. That's a fairy tale and why we now risk freedom every time we face a threat.

I'm not sure how we fix this. I think it may destroy the country. Hard times may be the only cure and that's saying something.

I was in elementary school then and don't remember being sick or having lots of classmates sick.

Now I remember getting every childhood disease in my first grade year and missing over 20 days of school. Measles, mumps, and chicken pox at least. I remember later from 71-73 getting sick and having what I called the "Friday" flue. I had it at least 5 times during those 3 school years and it always started or ended on Friday, so I either missed 4 days or 2 days of school. I just don't remember much illness in 68 or 69.

Quote:the differences between how the world responded to two pandemics, separated by 50 years, is more complicated than any single explanation.

“If I were 48 in 1968, I would have most likely served in World War II,” said Moir. “I would have had a little brother who served in Korea, and possibly might have a son or daughter fighting in Vietnam.” Death, he said, was a bigger and in some ways more accepted part of American life....

In 2020, we feel that being denied music festivals and restaurants is an egregious attack on our liberty. “A big part of our freakout over COVID-19 is a reaction to everything in this country that we’ve taken for granted,” Moir said. “When it’s taken away, we lose our minds.”

Some wise words in bold. Also: while they were rapidly moving in that direction, the American people of 1968 had not yet (by and by) bought into the notion that the Government had the responsibility to solve every problem, heal every sick person, and find a remedy for every human need. The American people of 2020 (by and by) act as if they do believe that, even though they’ll probably deny it if asked about it point-blank.

(05-17-2020 12:15 PM)JRsec Wrote:  It actually got started in '68 and it is one strain that I had, but I was young and it put me in bed for the better part of a week. It was a "Swine Flu" variant. The difference between it and the Corona virus is communicability. This virus lives so much longer on open surfaces and touch becomes a much easier pathway to catching it. With most strains of influenza a cough or sneeze or some other immediate spontaneous contact is what makes you catch it. You didn't have to Lysol your mail because the virus could live on paper for up to 24 hours or a bit longer. You didn't have to clean your door handles because it lived on metal surfaces for 3 days.

Still, I agree mostly with the viewpoint of the author. Social distancing because of the mode of transmission is effective. Gloving and masking helps keep an asymptomatic person from spreading it. Shutting down our world seems to me to be extreme. The masks unlike what some here think are not to keep you from getting it. They are to inhibit you from spreading it unknowingly.

Several docs are saying if you are asymptomatic, you aren't spreading the virus, b/c your immune system is still suppressing it enough not to spread it.

Also, even though it lives on surfaces longer, there is no evidence that the virus stays viable for that long.

Again, several docs have said despite that, the primary transmission is still through aerosol.

(05-17-2020 04:27 PM)TripleA Wrote:  

(05-17-2020 12:15 PM)JRsec Wrote:  It actually got started in '68 and it is one strain that I had, but I was young and it put me in bed for the better part of a week. It was a "Swine Flu" variant. The difference between it and the Corona virus is communicability. This virus lives so much longer on open surfaces and touch becomes a much easier pathway to catching it. With most strains of influenza a cough or sneeze or some other immediate spontaneous contact is what makes you catch it. You didn't have to Lysol your mail because the virus could live on paper for up to 24 hours or a bit longer. You didn't have to clean your door handles because it lived on metal surfaces for 3 days.

Still, I agree mostly with the viewpoint of the author. Social distancing because of the mode of transmission is effective. Gloving and masking helps keep an asymptomatic person from spreading it. Shutting down our world seems to me to be extreme. The masks unlike what some here think are not to keep you from getting it. They are to inhibit you from spreading it unknowingly.

Several docs are saying if you are asymptomatic, you aren't spreading the virus, b/c your immune system is still suppressing it enough not to spread it.

Also, even though it lives on surfaces longer, there is no evidence that the virus stays viable for that long.

Again, several docs have said despite that, the primary transmission is still through aerosol.

I don't know which docs you are talking to, but my buddy who was 2nd CMO at a massive Big Pharma company says otherwise. Yes it is aerosolized and therefore communicable that way, but the surface life is real. What most viruses are however is temperature sensitive and apparently this one doesn't like heat and humidity, which is good news for where we live for the next several months. But we know just in Lee county that touch gives it too you. Most of your cases came from several area churches. People in later services caught the virus though nobody in that hour's service had a link. When they used video they discovered that a person in a particular pew in the first service who did test positive was the connection to the those who caught it at later services because all of the cases were traceable to the same pew where the wooden surfaces were touched upon entering and the same hymnals were opened. There's your surface transmission. The other spread was in the first service where the pew in front of the infected person caught it. There's your aerosolized transmission. Singing projects more virus and in a sustained way than a cough or sneeze.

Triple A, this was in my mind without a doubt a deliberate act by the Chinese. They knew what they were dealing with 21 days in advance, they let go in the one province where the most foreign companies were located and they left air travel open. There's your weapon (the virus), your delivery system (air traffic to Europe and the U.S. which were the targets for economic purposes) and they covered it up to allow for 2nd generation transmission after incubation. (the intentional act).

Now we are discovering the number of people in this country who were supplying information and financing to them for this biological weapons facility. We had a professor arrested at Emory this past week and the FBI is now acknowledging that Wall Street is vulnerable because one firm that manages pensions had 70% of its investments in Chinese front companies that were actually Chinese military facilities and there is no transparency on the investments and no accountability to shareholders. It is estimated (and the Washington Post covered this if you care to read it) that over 1 million pensions may be in jeopardy and this is not the only investment company with that kind of exposure. Every bit of this follows precisely the Chinese War College of Beijing's plan for the economic neutralization of the U.S. and European Economies and the virus was just the first wave of the attack. Nationalization of U.S. and European Corporate assets located or held in China will be another and will happen at the slightest provocation or retaliation by the West, and part of that is the tanking of these phony investments which actually were funding their military operations against us. People like Buffet, Gates, Soros, and some other big names are going to be involved with backing some of the dummy companies.

It's past time for Americans to understand that what H.W., Clinton, W., and Obama pushed in the way of NAFTA and China trade is now coming home to roost in a most unpleasant way and that it's time we internalize all things necessary for our defense. We are going to need much better strategic planning for dealing with this than we did in 2006-7 when mortgage derivatives knocked us for a loop. I'd be interested in retrospect to see if there was China involvement in that, as I know an ancillary story where China got stuck by the UK for billions in bogus gold.

But none of this is a simple damned virus and nobody yet knows if this will need maintenance drugs to control or if a vaccine is possible, but the vaccine approach isn't looking likely. One of my Doc buddies in Auburn is a epidemiologist and he's concerned.

This wasn't designed to be hyper lethal, just to be pervasive and highly contagious so that it would lock down the economy, and be hard to eradicate quickly. You can't attack our economy (because it is so productive) until you shut it down. Then and only then will the seizing of assets and building debt destabilize the currency. As people realize this metals are moving up. It's time to quit denying, to strategize, and to get financially prepared for what is certainly coming next.

I don't want to find the link again but I believe the 1968/9 strain was gone pretty much by this date in 1969 (but it did kill quite a few older Americans up until then - probably something just a bit fewer than what we've seen so far with Covid 19 in the U.S.). The pandemic returned in the winter of 1969 and was much less deadly in the U.S. than it was in Europe and parts of the rest of the world.

100K dead in America total from the winter of 1968 to the winter of 1970. But pretty much nothing in the summer of 69 when Woodstock occurred.

I don't think we'll quite see a repeat of that with Covid 19. I do think deaths will go down quite a bit for the next 6 months, but not disappear altogether. Hopefully, we don't see a big repeat in the late fall/early winter, but if we do, perhaps again it will be worse elsewhere than in the U.S.

I also believe one of the reasons it didn't generate as much news (besides the ones listed already such as social media and the fact that we were a heartier population back then in terms of dealing with death) is the fact that there was a crapload of stuff going on in America in 1968/69 -- the Vietnam War, the Flower Generation, assassinations of MLK, Bobby Kennedy).

(05-17-2020 04:57 PM)Fort Bend Owl Wrote:  I don't want to find the link again but I believe the 1968/9 strain was gone pretty much by this date in 1969 (but it did kill quite a few older Americans up until then - probably something just a bit fewer than what we've seen so far with Covid 19 in the U.S.). The pandemic returned in the winter of 1969 and was much less deadly in the U.S. than it was in Europe and parts of the rest of the world.

100K dead in America total from the winter of 1968 to the winter of 1970. But pretty much nothing in the summer of 69 when Woodstock occurred.

I don't think we'll quite see a repeat of that with Covid 19. I do think deaths will go down quite a bit for the next 6 months, but not disappear altogether. Hopefully, we don't see a big repeat in the late fall/early winter, but if we do, perhaps again it will be worse elsewhere than in the U.S.

I also believe one of the reasons it didn't generate as much news (besides the ones listed already such as social media and the fact that we were a heartier population back then in terms of dealing with death) is the fact that there was a crapload of stuff going on in America in 1968/69 -- the Vietnam War, the Flower Generation, assassinations of MLK, Bobby Kennedy).

Already stated that above. Include a divisive election year, the lunar landing in '69, and it just wasn't a news priority.

I haven't posted as much lately and that's because there are two strains of ridiculous thought on this board at the moment. We have the it's all an overblown hoax crowd which is denying the main reason for the quarantine. COVID viruses recur over and over and immunity is measured by degree and this is a "novel" coronavirus which is highly contagious and deadly to a segment of the population of which I am a member. Then we have the "it's the end of the world" Chicken Little crowd who wants to politicize it. Neither crowd is taking the Chinese element of it seriously enough, and the former crowd ignorantly makes fun of the masks which statistically have a relatively low success in keeping you from getting it, but a much higher success in inhibiting your ability to spread it, provided you are actually wearing one.

The quarantine / social distancing has helped, but has also been destructive to the economy since such a wide percentage of the population was not likely to die from it. People my age needed to stay somewhat more isolated. But the economic damage done so far is nothing compared to what will happen when everyone discovers how many bogus Chinese front companies their stock portfolio has been invested in. The Virus was just the first phase of the economic attack. And the manipulations going on now are a far greater threat to our election freedom than anything we've ever experienced before as globalists try their damnedest to cover for the Chicoms.

On the good news side, thank your local camel or lama, because females produce quick antibodies to COVID viruses of all kinds and research for SARS and other COVID viruses have proven highly successful in not only taking these antibodies but replicating and infusing them to help those with compromised immune systems fight the viruses and those working on this hadn't published their research at the time of the virus from Wuhan was released. Estimated time on getting the treatment from the antibodies is 1 year. It is not a vaccine but can prevent you from developing the virus if you are exposed and can help you recover if you are infected and then can help suppress the virus in those who have had it. It has to finish trials with primates before it is released.

(05-17-2020 05:09 PM)JRsec Wrote:  

(05-17-2020 04:57 PM)Fort Bend Owl Wrote:  I don't want to find the link again but I believe the 1968/9 strain was gone pretty much by this date in 1969 (but it did kill quite a few older Americans up until then - probably something just a bit fewer than what we've seen so far with Covid 19 in the U.S.). The pandemic returned in the winter of 1969 and was much less deadly in the U.S. than it was in Europe and parts of the rest of the world.

100K dead in America total from the winter of 1968 to the winter of 1970. But pretty much nothing in the summer of 69 when Woodstock occurred.

I don't think we'll quite see a repeat of that with Covid 19. I do think deaths will go down quite a bit for the next 6 months, but not disappear altogether. Hopefully, we don't see a big repeat in the late fall/early winter, but if we do, perhaps again it will be worse elsewhere than in the U.S.

I also believe one of the reasons it didn't generate as much news (besides the ones listed already such as social media and the fact that we were a heartier population back then in terms of dealing with death) is the fact that there was a crapload of stuff going on in America in 1968/69 -- the Vietnam War, the Flower Generation, assassinations of MLK, Bobby Kennedy).

Already state that above. Include a divisive election year, the lunar landing in '69, and it just wasn't a news priority.

I haven't posted as much lately and that's because there are two strains of ridiculous thought on this board at the moment. We have the it's all an overblown hoax crowd which is denying the main reason for the quarantine. COVID viruses recur over and over and immunity is measured by degree and this is a "novel" coronavirus which is highly contagious and deadly to a segment of the population of which I am a member. Then we have the "it's the end of the world" Chicken Little crowd who wants to politicize it. Neither crowd is taking the Chinese element of it seriously enough, and the former crowd ignorantly makes fun of the masks which statistically have a relatively low success in keeping you from getting it, but a much higher success in inhibiting your ability to spread it, provided you are actually wearing one.

The quarantine / social distancing has helped, but has also been destructive to the economy since such a wide percentage of the population was not likely to die from it. People my age needed to stay somewhat more isolated. But the economic damage done so far is nothing compared to what will happen when everyone discovers how many bogus Chinese front companies their stock portfolio has been invested in. The Virus was just the first phase of the economic attack. And the manipulations going on now are a far greater threat to our election freedom than anything we've ever experienced before as globalists try their damnedest to cover for the Chicoms.

On the good news side, thank your local camel or lama, because females produce quick antibodies to COVID viruses of all kinds and research for SARS and other COVID viruses have proven highly successful in not only taking these antibodies but replicating and infusing them to help those with compromised immune systems fight the viruses and those working on this hadn't published their research at the time of the virus from Wuhan was released. Estimated time on getting the treatment from the antibodies is 1 year. It is not a vaccine but can prevent you from developing the virus if you are exposed and can help you recover if you are infected and then can help suppress the virus in those who have had it. It has to finish trials with primates before it is released.

both sides are doing it to themselves....I'm just moseying on like I always have....it's pretty simple if you're at risk to self distance/isolate....

#sickofstupid

#pissonthat

Whoopee we're all gonna die - Country Joe McDonald.

(05-17-2020 01:45 PM)wmubroncopilot Wrote:  Overreaction or not, we are at 90,000+ US deaths within 3 months (or so) vs. 100,000 over multiple years. So I think it's safe to say this is worse, although of course we have more people living here now.

It’s been here a lot longer than 3 months. The chinese flu was out and about around our thanksgiving if not prior to that. That’s just when we first started getting wind of it.

Now, riddle me this Batman- where did this come from? Who may have been working on engineering this virus? Why would they be engineering or manipulating a virus? To better understand it? To be able to cure it?

Does that sound like something the chinese would be interested in? Why does it disproportionately kill only those over 60? When would a communist govt deem you no longer “useful”? Maybe around 60? What’s the average life expectancy in communist china?

Culling the herd, folks. We (generally speaking) honor and admire our elders.

Commies? To them they serve no useful purpose any longer. They can’t work, so no use for them. Simple math, as been quoted here previously, “There are too many of us anyway”.

Genetically engineered to attack the older folks, protect the young. How many people under 40 with NO other issues going on have died? How about under 20? Now look at 60+, even 70+.

The average age of those passing away from the WiFlu will end up being something like 73+!YO’s. What kind of societal structure would benefit in an epidemic like that?

Simple: one that doesn’t give a damn about the individual. One that sees only a cog in the wheel. Once the usefulness has passed its only a burden, not a person.

And, of course, they lie about everything. It’s what good commies do.