This was Woodstock. As Jeffrey Tucker reminds us, Woodstock took place in the midst of a global pandemic that claimed more American lives than has Covid-19 (at least so far) — at a time when the population was much smaller . After correcting for population size and demographics, Tucker estimates the Hong Kong flu epidemic of 1969 killed the equivalent of 250,000 contemporary Americans, compared to under 100,000 so far for the current affliction.
Yet in 1969, American life went on pretty much as normal. As Tucker points out:
Stock markets didn’t crash because of the flu. Congress passed no legislation. The Federal Reserve did nothing. Not a single governor acted to enforce social distancing, curve flattening (even though hundreds of thousands of people were hospitalized), or banning of crowds. No mothers were arrested for taking their kids to other homes. No surfers were arrested. No daycares were shut even though there were more infant deaths with this virus than the one we are experiencing now. There were no suicides, no unemployment, no drug overdoses attributable to flu.
Media covered the pandemic but it never became a big issue.
The Woodstock producers flew in a dozen doctors to have on hand in case of a fast-spreading virus, but they seem to have given no serious thought to the prospect of cancelling.
Why such a difference between then and now? Tucker suggests a few possible culprits (the 24 hour news cycle, political and cultural shifts, etc.), but the first thing that came to my mind was that folks today are a whole lot richer than folks in 1969, and can therefore much better afford to take a few months off. If the average worker in 1969 had taken a four-month unscheduled vacation without any assistance, he’d have gone hungry — and the amount of available assistance was limited by the fact that everyone else was a lot poorer then too.
Here are the key facts we need to test that theory:
- The income of the average American today is about two-and-a-half times what it was in 1969.
- The income elasticity of the value of life is estimated to be somewhere between .5 and 1.0, and probably toward the lower end of that range for a developed country like the United States. I’ll take it to be .6. Here the “value of life” refers to the amount people are willing to pay to avoid a given small chance of death, and the elasticity estimate means that the value of your life is (approximately) proportional to I.6, where I is your income.
Taken together, these facts imply that the value of a life in 1969 was about 58% of what it is today, which in turn implies that people would have been willing to put up with only 58% as much lost income in exchange for the same amount of safety. If you’re willing to tolerate six months without a paycheck to avoid, say, a 1% chance of death, then your 1969 self would have been willing to tolerate only about three-and-a-half months. If avoiding that 1% chance of death requires, say, a five-month lockdown (or any other length longer than three-and-a-half months but shorter than six), then you’re going to favor that lockdown, though you’d have scoffed at the thought of it in 1969.
Even this fails to account for another factor: A national shutdown of a given length would have been a lot costlier in 1969 than it is in 2020, when a good 30% of us can work from home. Perhaps a six-month lockdown only costs us (on average), say, three month’s income. (I pulled that “three months” out of my hat. I’m sure with a little research I could have done better.) If that’s what we’re willing to tolerate for a given amount of safety, then our 1969 selves would have tolerated only a one-and-three-quarter months’s income loss, which might have meant something like a two month lockdown. Where we’d tolerate six months, they’d tolerate only two.
In other words: Nobody considered locking down the economy in 1969 because they couldn’t afford to (or more precisely, given their relative poverty, they preferred to spend their wealth on other things). Today’s lockdown is widely supported because it’s a luxury we’ve grown rich enough to afford. In other words, the lockdown is yet another triumph of capitalism.
That, at least, is what the back of my envelope says. I expect there are people who have thought about this a whole lot harder than I have. I hope we hear from some of them.
Another explanation is that the ’69 flu killed 250k contemporary Americans with few precautions, but had we done nothing this year covid would have killed many more (millions?). That’s not implausible, the curves really were exponential until lock-down started.
His argument sounds a bit like, “Look, there was no need to lock down, since so few people died.” Or “There was no need to freak out over Y2K since so few problems happened.”
Also it’s important to be skeptical of flu death numbers: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-covid-19-deaths-to-flu-deaths-is-like-comparing-apples-to-oranges/
There is another HUGE difference, in the available medical technology and expectation of care. In the US, very few COVID-19 patients will die at home, most will use a hospital (in fact, an ICU) bed for some time first. This makes it far more visible, and far more risky for OTHER ICU patients.
But who should be making that calculation? “Us” or “them”? Given my circumstance I might well choose to go to work (or Woodstock) while someone else chooses to stay home.
This is basically what I’ve qualitatively argued elsewhere: wealthier societies demand more safety, and staying at home is less costly, enabled by the internet for both work and grocery delivery.
That doesn’t necessarily justify a government imposed lock down, but I do think it helps to explain why many are not eager to resume normality and take risks.
I was at Woodstock. Not that that makes a difference, but the point is that I am old enough to remember the era well. And one of the biggest differences between then and now is that there was neither an Internet (and associated social media apps) nor home computers and smartphones. It’s very easy right now for news and ideas to spread.
Also, we’ve had several biological scares in the past 20 years: Ebola, MERS, SARS, etc. and are probably more sensitive to it.
In the case of the U.S., don’t discount the fact we have a fool at the helm of the CDC and a second fool at the helm of the U.S. government.
All well and good, but misses two points.
1. *I* was not allowed to make a choice. The choice was made for me by, in my case, Newsom.
2. I would bet dollars to donuts that no thought of economics ever passed through Newsom’s head.
Cheers
Two points:
First, the Hong Kong flu came in two distinct waves, the first starting in winter 68 (in the US it coordinated with schools’ winter break and largely mitigated the transmission rate) and ending by March 69. The second wave didn’t start until winter 69. So by August 69 (Woodstock) there had been 4-5 months of “normal living”. Let’s all imagine what our lives will look like 4-5 months from now. Maybe find an event that happened in Feb-Mar 69 for comparison. Yes it won’t be same as COVID but maybe you’ll see a heightened level of anxiety.
Second, influenza and a novel coronavirus are really two different animals. A new flu strain will be addressed with a vaccine in a few months (we already have the pipeline for production ready). A coronavirus that has never infected humans (no immunity, vaccine, or pipeline for production) AND can be transmitted before carriers are actively symptomatic is much scarier. The Hong Kong flu was an H3N2 variant, and the H2N2 flu (Asian flu) from 1957 seemed to offer some prophylactic effect seeing as they had the same neuraminidase mutations. RE: asymptomatic transmission, SARS was largely a non-story due to the fact that people were only contagious once symptoms were obvious, so contact tracing was easier.
#5. Rick. I have heard that if you remember it you were not really there. :)
His 250000 figure is bogus. It is based partly on people being less obese than today so fatality rate was lower. That means it was less scary. Tucker is being ignorant or disingenuous. I have also seen estimates of 34000 deaths in usa from apparently reputable sources so that needs further investigation.
Maybe the lockdown is more tolerable because millions of people can do a lot more from home. They have broadband internet connections, Zoom conferencing, email, smart phones, home computers, etc, and they have white collar jobs where many or most of the duties can be carried out at home with the equipment they already have.
I am intrigued by the two estimates of US deaths from the pandemic of 1968. CDC says 100,000 and I am quite prepared to accept this. It seems reasonable given the attention it has recieved, whereas 34,000 seems not that much above seasonal flu in a bad year. However, the 34,000 figure is widely cited in reputable sources, such as this one within the CDC pages.
https://phil.cdc.gov/Details.aspx?pid=15874
I wonder where it comes from? I have only seen these two figures; 34,000 and 100,000.
This source
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2374803/
in figure 2 shows deaths for each year. The 1968/69 pandemic years are little higher that 1975/6 – a non pandemic year. Table shows mean monthly death rate for 68/69 at 4.2 and for 1975/6 at 3.6. Non-pandemic years 59/60 and 67/68 were 4.1 and 2.3 mean monthly deaths per 100,000 respectively.
Since the 1980’s the rate has been consistently lower than the spikes during the 50’s to 70’s. The 1968 pandemic did kill a lot of people, but it was much closer to the then-normal variation and was about the same as the average from 1945-1951 non pandemic years. The Covid peak will appear to be a sharp spike much higher than the background variation.
Summing up, the reason why there were fewer measures taken then include.
The death rate was normal for many living then and relatively unexceptional for the time.
The 250,000 equivalent for comparison is totaly spurious.
There were fewer opportunities to work at home.
During Woodstock as far as they knew the pandemic was over.
Flu deaths are estimates not counted as are Covid deaths. Counted flu deaths are an order of magnitude lower than the estimates.
Society is wealthier and more risk averse.
The biggest factor is that the potential number of deaths from Covid is much higher than for 68/69 Flu. Estimates of 2 million could be low or high. We chose to be a Gallant rather than a Goofus and recognised that a reasonable chance of a disaterous outcome is worthy of taking steps to avoid.
We may have gone too far, we may have relaxed too soon, but doing nothing was never a good option.
Steve,
I have always thought economists should define goods/services into 3 (or even 4) categories:
-extreme inferior goods (income elasticity negative)
-inferior goods (income elasticity 1)
At issue is what portion of a person’s budget do they devote to a specific good? Aside from quantity purchased, is this portion rising/falling?
As you, I suspect that “life” is a superior good. But then, I suspect that “being neurotic” is also.
Fixed:
-extreme inferior goods (income elasticity negative)
-inferior goods (income elasticity 1)
Now fixed:
-extreme inferior goods (income elasticity negative)
-inferior goods (income elasticity less than 1)
-normal goods (income elasticity around 1)
-superior goods (income elasticity greater than 1)
Why does he control for things like health and obesity? I mean, if he’s saying that Americans back then were less likely to die from a disease, then he’s, at least slightly, arguing that we should take greater steps than they did to prevent a pandemic.
#15. Exactly. He knows what he is doing and is creating bogus numbers to sell his point. It does not matter much to him if the number is later debunked – it was enough to get it into public attention and it got repeated all over the place – including here. I would ask SL to check a bit more before repeating such figures.
@15 and @16
If two diseases kill the same number of people in a population of a given size but one population is older and more unhealthy than the other then to my mind it seems perfectly reasonable to say that the disease hitting the younger more healthier community is more lethal (It will kill more people per million in any given age/health status bracket).
So while Tucker doesn’t give his exact reasoning for converting the 100k HK flu deaths to 250k in CV19 terms it does not seem out of the ballpark to me (he gets quite a long way there just by making the deaths/million adjustments based on increased population size).
Its also true that for an older and more unhealthy population its more likely that more resources will be spent on death-from-disease prevention even without factoring in differences in wealth.
Yeah, I agree it’s reasonable to say that the disease that kills the healthier population is more lethal.
But Tucker is saying that we should take that sort of lethality into account when judging how much, if any, of a lockdown we should have. And no, we shouldn’t take that sort of lethality into account.
Imagine a flu hits Youngistan, where everyone is 30. They all get mildly ill and then get better. The disease moves onto to Oldistan, where it kills most of the old-timers who get it. Oldistan locks down, and the people in Youngistan say, “Why are you locking down? It killed just as many of us as it did of you. You know, once you control for age and health.”
By the way, Harold, I don’t have an answer to your question about the different death tolls of the 1968 flu, but here’s an article on two different ways of counting deaths from epidemics, which might explain it. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-covid-19-deaths-are-counted1/
@18
I agree but I don’t think that is Tucker’s main point. He is looking at two roughly comparable pandemics separated by 50 years and asking why one led to a huge reduction in civil liberties and the other didn’t. Changes in wealth, age of population, and health status of population probably explain some of the difference but I’m skeptical if these things truly explain what has changed in the past 50 years to allow the government to get away with such violations of our rights with so little opposition.
When one realizes what was known on Jan 1 (nothing) and what was known Mar 31 (virtually nothing actionable – except don’t force nursing homes to co-mingle covid victims with healthy residents) one could reasonably conclude that there has been nothing that sets this apart from any of the other flu strains that struck within the last century.
I, for one, conclude that President Trump’s mistake was buying into the hubris of the “experts.” I think the models and current knowledge bear this out. That and the new Democrat slogan “never let a crisis go to waste.
A couple random thoughts: this is a flu similar to Hong Kong Flu A, still present in today’s vaccine. Most baby-boomers should remember the Hong Kong Flu. One regularly ignored factor is how useless the flu vaccine is. This season the CDC was thrilled because the effective rate was 45% compared with 30% last year.
In a totally unmitigated scenario, over 90% of the US population would catch the virus (the faster the virus is allowed to spread, the higher the percentage of people who ultimately get infected).
This would all happen over a time period of 2-3 months.
Since hospitals would be completely overwhelmed, only a minority of the sick would get any kind of medical treatment. The mortality rate wouldn’t be 0.8% as recently in New York, it would be at least twice as high.
The result would be about 5 million dead, approximately 20 times as many as during the 1969 flu.
In other words, the comparison is completely spurious.
In 1969 most adult Americans had been school in basic civics, so they understood the Constitution. Our public education system is all about indoctrinating our little darlings into fighting discrimination, global warming, inequality, excessive energy use, etc. Constitution? What’s that?
#18. It is plausible that the low figure is counted deaths (from death certificates perhaps) and the high figure is calculated from excess mortality. This is why we must be so careful when bandying these figures around to check we are comparing like with like. The Covid deaths I think are more like the counted deaths for the 69/69 pandemic, if that is the reason for the two figures. I have seen 33,800 deaths cited, which seems a very precise number, which most sources seem to round off to 34,000.
#21. I agree with the sentiment here, but given the unknowns I think it more accurate to say we have good reason to think that the number of deaths could be as high as this.
Harald,
while we don’t know exactly how high the number of fatalities would be in a completely unmitigated Covid-19 scenario, but we can say with 99% confidence that it would be at least an order of magnitude higher than in a completely unmitigated 1969 flu scenario.
The appropriate comparison isn’t the 1969 flu, it’s the 1918 Spanish flu.
For me, the most fascinating thing about this pandemic, right from the start, has been how HARD it is for neurotypical people, even smart ones, to wrap their head around a completely new situation. They keep coming up with comparisons like the one in this thread which are transparently absurd.
It was a similar situation in 2008, but not nearly as extreme.
Advo,
I won’t argue against the idea that we have very good reason to think the deaths would be an order of magnitude higher. I don’t know where 99% would come from. To my mind it does not need to be as high as this for the action to be taken. The uncertainties are quite large. Do we know with 99% certainty that the asymptomatic infected population is not much larger than we think?
For this sort of discussion it is a bit nit-picky to argue about the exact level of confidence. However, the critics leap on expressions of overconfidence to negate the entire argument. They also leap on expressions of uncertainty as “they don’t know for sure”, so it is a bit of a dilemma.
Somewhat like the legal definition of “reasonable doubt” is never expressed by the authorities as a number – is it 95% confident? 1%? Who knows? Whereas balance of probability is defined as more likely to be true than not true, which can be expressed quite clearly as greater than 50%. Similarly the exact number we require for this one could be left a bit vague.
I think the case is beyond reasonable doubt. Perhaps we could agree on that description?
>> I think the case is beyond reasonable doubt. Perhaps we could agree on that description?
Yes.
Lawence #1 and Steve #7’s point 2 are i think right: The OP is not even close to an apples-apples comparison (COVID is very different than the ’69 flu, and the 2019 experts knew this)
npr.org today: “[Two recent Nature papers’] Modelers Suggest Pandemic Lockdowns Saved Millions From Dying Of COVID-19”