I was watching Chinatown the other day on one of the free-'cause-corona movie stations on cable, and I got to thinking about all those hats. Yes, Monty Python was right that people just don't wear hats the way they use to. According to NPR it is all due to the car and JFK. Whatever the reason, it really stands out when you look at those old pictures of pandemics of the 20th century: 1917 they have hats; 1957 they have hats; then suddenly 1968 there are no hats.
The pandemic of 1957 was bad but not as bad as 1917, with an estimated 1,100,000 death worldwide and around 70,000 in the United States. Even then Vice President Richard Nixon came down with the bug. If it wasn't for the Walter Reed Army Research Institute developing a vaccine before the virus reached America, it could have been much worse.
The pandemic of 1968, known as the Hong Kong Flu, was about a virulent as 1957, but the United States only experienced 33,800 fatalities in the first wave, making it the nation's mildest pandemic of the 20th century. The drop in deaths was attributed to improved medical care as well as a lingering immunity from the 1957 pandemic, but a New York Times article from 1970 considered the lower rates in the U.S. as "one of the mysteries of the Hong Kong epidemic". This virus struck in two waves, starting in 1969 and continuing through 1972, with most of the world wide deaths taking place during this second wave. When it was all over, about 100,000 Americans had died in total, the majority being over 65 years of age, and a world wide total of roughly 1,000,000 deaths.
Maybe our lack of hats is indicative of more than just an motorized conveyance and a charismatic leader with Addison's disease, and is more representative of our self-confidence turned to over-confidence. We sent a man to the moon and defeated a disease that killed over a million people but wasn't so bad at home (even tho' it was - over-confidence maybe). If that is the case then break out the fedora, because this time is not like it was in 1968 (but I can see where Trump came up with that 100,000 number despite his obvious misunderstandings). In fact it might be a little bit more like the middle ages.
In the short term there was profound psychological uncertainty. Life was seen as cheap. Extreme attitudes on either end of the spectrum were adopted by some—ranging from hedonism to asceticism, including groups of flagellants circulating through cities. And of course, many looked for scapegoats.
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Demographic changes caused upheavals in economic and social structures and signaled the end of "manorialism" and feudalism. People stopped working the land of lords in exchange for protection and started getting paid for working. So this was birth of wage labor. Monarchies like England fought the change, but it happened.
Compare that with what Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore had to say...
Americans, I think, are just under this delusion that what’s going to happen is a month from now, it will all be — we’ll have hopefully conquered this disease, and we can all go outside again. It will be sort of back to what it was. No. It’s going to be like a nuclear bomb was dropped on the economy. People aren’t just going to go right back to their jobs and so on. It’s going to be really, really, really rough. We’re going to have effects that affect our society for a decade from this shutdown.
Of course in Europe it may be a little different, where companies don't seem to worry about staying in business and people are keeping their wages and don't have to worry about losing health insurance in the middle of a pandemic.
"It basically means we will survive and we will be able to keep the workforce on board. So that's a pretty powerful tool actually for us," says Alexander Kranki, who runs a software development company near Düsseldorf that employs 130 people.
Under Germany's Kurzarbeit system, the government pays much of the salaries to laid-off workers for up to 12 months during economic crises. That means Kranki doesn't have to worry that employees he's recruited and trained over the years will defect to other companies.
So maybe if we face the fact that we as a nation aren't as special as we think we are, overcome our total lack of trust in science and come to terms with this narcissism we seem to be straddled with, then maybe we can get our shit together enough to start treating each other with the same respect other Western nations seem to do.
Or we can just go back to wearing hats.