It was a question Ben posed at lunch today.
If COVID happened in the 80s, I think it would've been addressed much more aggressively. (Let's leave HIV out of the discussion for now since at the time it affected a smaller population and it was a population of—let's face it—"undesirables" and forty years later there is still no vaccine against it.
The anti-max movement hadn't taken hold in the 80s. Similarly, there was no internet to spread disinformation and conspiracy theories. Surely such things still existed back then; they just didn't have the global reach they do now.
At the same time, since there was no internet, people wouldn't be working from home; they'd wither not be working at all, or they'd be forced to work in person, thereby increasing the rate of transmission until the population had been sufficiently inoculated. In either case I still believe commerce would've ground to a halt much like it did during the first few months of our own pandemic. I won't go so far to say the threat would've been eliminated any more quickly than it is currently happening, but we wouldn't be facing this widespread resistance and denial we are now which is slowing the eradication of COVID down.
What do y'all think?
I think the Internet gave a voice, no wait, not a voice: a megaphone! to asinine people to spread their lack of knowledge and pretend they suddenly became 'specialists', 'experts' even in knowledge domains that are all as far from reach to them as I am to becoming the next Pope – though I believe I am far more fetched to becoming so than any right-winger self-righteous household 🙂
I believe such people 'earned their stripes' while invading social media – Facebook for starters, of course – and propagating nonsense about vegan diets, BARF for dogs, the benefits (and obligation even!) to become gluten-free, to drink kale cabbage juice at breakfast (you uneducated people: kale cabbage has always been grown for the sole purpose of feeding farmed rabbits, so no it's not proper human food, it's time you realise Gwyneth Paltrow sold you a lie), etc…
And I think that now the very same people, these idiots that lack neurons, are the same cheering up the Woke movement, the grammatical genderism (you have no idea how it unnerves me when it comes to the French language…), and so on…
So, as much as I recall the 80s for being the evident starting point of the western civilization's fall – but what a fun we had back then! – I also believe that, should a Covid crisis have happened in these years, yes it would have been handled in a much better way across the worldwide population.
Of course the abilities of the major labs surely may not have allowed such a swift response regarding the releasing of several vaccines, but at least the group awareness among populations as to the attitude to adopt would most certainly not have been so dumb as what we are currently facing.
Just my two cents, as usual.
Actually, I blame AOL. It was the root of all evil. I saw the beginnings of this nonsense even then.