The Summer of 1968, the plague year

From Woodstock Occurred in the Middle of a Pandemic by Jeffrey A. Tucker.

In my lifetime, there was another deadly flu epidemic in the United States. The flu spread from Hong Kong to the United States, arriving December 1968 and peaking a year later. It ultimately killed 100,000 people in the U.S., mostly over the age of 65, and one million worldwide.

Lifespan in the US in those days was 70 whereas it is 78 today. Population was 200 million as compared with 328 million today. It was also a healthier population with low obesity. If it would be possible to extrapolate the death data based on population and demographics, we might be looking at a quarter million deaths today from this virus. So in terms of lethality, it was as deadly and scary as COVID-19 if not more so, though we shall have to wait to see.

“In 1968,” says Nathaniel L. Moir in National Interest, “the H3N2 pandemic killed more individuals in the U.S. than the combined total number of American fatalities during both the Vietnam and Korean Wars.”

And this happened in the lifetimes of every American over 52 years of age.

I was 5 years old and have no memory of this at all. My mother vaguely remembers being careful and washing surfaces, and encouraging her mom and dad to be careful. Otherwise, it’s mostly forgotten today. Why is that?

The Johns Hopkins count for Covid-19 deaths in the US is this morning about 61,000. There are good reasons to believe that this is only an order of magnitude correct. We know there are Covid-19 deaths which are not being counted as such. We know there are a lot of deaths being included which cannot be confirmed as Covid-19. The CDC guidelines are to include any deaths which have a suspicion of being related to Covid-19, even if there is no confirmed infection. We also know that in terms of emergency federal funds, a high count leads to more funds.

If the 1968 cumulative death toll was 100,000, then its equivalent given today's population would be 164,000. In much of the US, we seem to have hit the first peak and new infections are falling. There will be aftershocks. We are tracking at 61,000 against a two year 164,000 comparable total toll. The cumulative number over two years may possibly be greater than 164,000 but it seems like we are on track for both these events to be roughly comparable.

If that is the case, then Tucker's question is very pertinent. Of course, the two events will differ in innumerable ways but it remains curious that what seem like to comparable events should elicit two such disparate responses.

This is a knowledge and wisdom issue, especially the culturally acceptable norms of decision making in events where knowledge is inadequate or misleading. The statistical models are grossly wrong to the point of being counter[-productive. You have to fall back on knowledge derived from case studies rather than from statistical analysis.

I have posted in the past on this mystery our forgetting past epidemics.

This goes to the central tenant in The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich. We got to a point where cultural evolution outstripped genetic evolution. And cultural evolution in part is based on our capacity to generate knowledge and wisdom in a cumulative fashion and in part based on intergenerational knowledge transfer, from the oldest generations to the newest.

But one of the challenges is that technology evolution has outstripped cultural evolution and we are at an interlude when we seem to have let some of social and cultural norms erode to the point where some of that knowledge transference has come off the rails. To our detriment when confronted by a long cycle event like a global pandemic - an event experienced episodically every few decades. In the post-war era, we seem to have fallen into the habit or practice of memory-holing things which remain pertinent if we would just pay attention.