ANALYSIS: TRUE. Michael Barone: COVID-19 shows we’re more risk averse than post-World War II Americans.
Do you remember the 1957-58 Asian flu? Or the 1968-69 Hong Kong flu? I do. I was a teenager during the former, an adult finishing law school during the latter. And I followed the news much more than the average person my age, yet I cannot dredge up more than the dimmest memory of either of those epidemics.
I don’t have any memory of schools closing, though apparently a few did here and there. I have no memories of city or state lockdowns, of closed offices and factories and department stores, of people banned from parks and beaches.
Yet these two influenza epidemics had death tolls roughly comparable to COVID-19. Between 70,000 and 116,000 people in the United States are estimated to have died from Asian flu. That’s between .04% and .07% of the nation’s population, somewhat more than the .03% COVID-19 death rate so far.
The Asian flu, such as COVID-19, was rarely fatal for children and more deadly for the elderly — but it was also a special risk to pregnant women.
The Hong Kong flu, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says, had a more precisely estimated U.S. death toll of 100,000 from 1968-70 (years that included the Woodstock festival), or .05% of the total population. Both flus had high death rates among the elderly, but apparently not as high in proportion as COVID-19 has had now.
Once again, there were no nationwide school closings, no multi-month lockdowns, no daily presidential news conferences. Apparently, neither the nation’s leaders nor the vast bulk of its people felt that such drastic measures were called for.
Perhaps some of this calm reaction can be ascribed to confidence that a vaccine would be developed, as other flu vaccines had been developed after the 1918-19 Spanish flu epidemic. But flu vaccines are never entirely effective, and none was widely available until after the Asian and Hong Kong flus had swept over the nation.
Fundamental attitudes can change in a nation over half a century, and the very different responses to this year’s coronavirus epidemic and the influenzas of 50 and 60 years ago suggests that people today are much more risk averse, much more willing to undergo massive inconvenience and disruption to avoid marginal increases in fatal risk.
At least some of this can be explained by different experiences. The Asian and Hong Kong flus arrived in an America amid and at the end of what I call the “Midcentury Moment.” That’s my name for the quarter-century after World War II when Americans enjoyed low-inflation economic growth and a degree of cultural uniformity and respect for institutions that some yearn for today.
Midcentury Americans had living memories of World War II, with its 405,000 American military deaths. They were troubled not so much by the number of military deaths in Korea (36,000) and Vietnam (58,000) as by our leaders’ failure, after years of effort, to achieve victory.
Contrast this with the shrillness of outcries over orders of magnitude fewer military deaths in Iraq (4,497) and Afghanistan (2,216). Yes, every death is a tragedy, but those numbers total less than the average number of deaths in America every day (7,707) in 2018. But today’s Americans, beneficiaries of a victory in the Cold War that was almost entirely bloodless, seem to blanch at paying any human price at all.
To be fair, that’s the result of two generations of deliberate cultural manipulation.