The Woodstock Virus

Three Days of Peace & Ccontagion

A friend sends a link to an article that has been circulating on the internet: Woodstock happened in the middle of a pandemic similar to the present one.

Indeed, who even remembers?

I didn’t. Until I did more research and came across a reference to “Hong Kong flu.” That rang a bell. But only a muffled one.

The subtext, no doubt, is that we have wildly overreacted to the coronavirus. Why the apocalyptic shutdown? Have our leaders screwed up badly?

Not a lot of social distancing, after all, at Woodstock.

Are the two epidemics comparable? On the surface, yes. The article cites 100,000 dead in the US, one million worldwide, from the Hong Kong flu. Coronavirus has so far killed 79,000 in the US, and 277,000 worldwide. And it is worth remembering that the population of America, and the world, was a lot lower then.

Yet this is deceptive. To begin with, we need to factor in the lockdown. If I recall correctly, the initial projections had COVID-19 killing 250,000 in the US by now, had we not locked down.

Granted, that projection might have been wrong. To double check, compare the death rate so far for Sweden, which has had no formal lockdown, with Denmark and Norway, neighbouring and socially similar countries that have had lockdowns. The death rate in Sweden is currently 3.5 times that in Denmark, 8 times that in Norway. Transferring those multiples to the US suggests that, without the lockdown, we should have seen from 276,500 to 632,000 American deaths by now.

Now consider that the Hong Kong flu total is for a pandemic that lasted over two years; the second year, as with the Spanish flu, was more lethal. Coronavirus has been with us for only about six months. So for fair comparison, we must multiply again by four: a projected death toll, in the US alone, of 1,106,000 to 2,528,000.

That makes COVID-19 an order of magnitude worse than the Hong Kong flu.

Another factor to consider, in how little we remember the Hong Kong flu, is that it, as with the coronavirus, was far more dangerous to those over 65. To those under 65, it was just the flu.

Those still alive today would have been quite young in 1969.

As to the idea that we have become too soft, too unused to various afflictions, and because of this have overreacted, this does not wash when you consider that the US was not the only nation to go into lockdown. Most other nations are doing it; China did it first. It is not plausible that all of them are now softer and less familiar with discomfort than the US was in 1969. While American youth were celebrating at Woodstock, the Chinese were, in some places, eating each other.

We may indeed now urgently need to re-open. But I don’t think this 1969 parallel amounts to any argument that the authorities have been wrong to shut things down.

The good news we should take from the comparison is that society seems to have healed itself after the Hong Kong flu with no permanent scars, barely a memory. The same seems true of the Spanish flu; there was no economic fallout easily traceable to it. The same seems true of AIDS, so recently seemingly poised to depopulate the world.

This too shall pass.