I am reading Niall Ferguson’s Doom. I have learned three surprising things so far. Wars, revolutions and major social changes were shaped by plagues and pandemics. I need to keep a list of pandemic dates handy to understand a force long ignored in teaching history. Many murderous pogroms of Jews were a Christian response to plagues and pandemics.
Second, the end of the Cold War was in large part due to the incompetence and maleficent's of the USSR’s administrative apparatus. That gives me hope because most of the agencies of the government in the U.S. are totally incompetent.
Third and most important, the reason for the title of this blog, in 1957 I lived through a flu pandemic nearly identical to the current Covid 19, but there was no national hysteria about social distancing, empty schools, face masks and the whole tyrannical apparatus we globally experienced last year.
I, like most intelligent people, do not trust any news medium or agency of government. What I do trust are data on murders and deaths because it is hard to hide a large number of dead bodies or create them ex nihilo. Therefore I looked at the 1957 flu pandemic in terms of excess deaths for the years 1957 and 1958 compared to the years before and after. We had 20% more deaths in those years than the years before and after.
While we yielded to a totalitarian health regime in 2020, the excess deaths over the previous year was 18%. One epidemic, 1957, was virtually unnoticed; the latest one, with many reliable treatments, was a major social devastation.