For those of your who remember 1968 1969

My mother didn't know anything about it, and she was 29 in that year.

R1 You must be kidding there were 4x the deaths of covid.

I was 3 and active in the civil rights movement and the drug scene. I think a joke or two on Laugh-In and better prices at the Chinese restaurant.

Precocious, R3!

At that age I am sure you were adorable R3.

Some sources say only (!) one million deaths, as opposed to four million. Which is quite a disparity. The U.S. was able to come up with a vaccine, which probably kept the death toll down.

The printed sources at the time including the encyclopedia say 4 million. Internet sources now say 1 to 4 million.

The world wasn't nearly as global. People around the world were mostly provincial. Nobody took in much news each day, each week. I lived in suburban NY. The news was Vietnam, peace, counter culture wars, and Woodstock. My mom and dad fought about going to Woodstock or not. (My mom was for, my Dad against. Dad won.) The space program. Civil rights. I don't remember a damn peep about the Hong Kong Flu. My mother told me children were starving in India or Africa, when I wouldn't eat my dinner. Vietnam seemed to be the only dire concern for white middle class Americans. My parents were pro hippy, pro civil rights, anti war, but still kinda boring middle class professionals. People didn't get sick and die of Hong Kong flu.

I was born then.

I wondered the same out of curiosity. Supposedly none of the severe steps like lockdown were taken then.

News was so different pre internet. You just didn't have the same global perspective. What there was to read or take in was very limited, and you couldn't just go and look more up. You knew what was in the local paper or on the local news hour.

What I remember of 68-69. The weekly death count from Cronkite (Vietnam war) and how much I wanted a bike with a banana seat rather than a stupid Schwinn. Nothing about a flu

So it seems to have no impact on folks lives?

I am very surprised.

I guess is shows the power of the modern media.

It killed mainly old people over 65 and infants.

People who got the 1957 Asian flu also had some immunity to the Hong Kong flu. It’s estimated that between 34,000 and 100,00 died in the U.S. There was a vaccine after four months.

WHO says they think it was 1 million deaths total worldwide. This was over two years.

It was so tragic that a couple of years later they created a Saturday morning cartoon about a superhero dog called "Hong Kong Phooey".

I was 8 yo I don't recall my parents ,teachers ever mentioning the Hong Kong flu.

I discovered drugs during the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco. I was 14. The next 6 years are a complete fog to the point that I don't remember any mention of Hong Kong flu.

The commie pinkos were still a huge threat. Russia was the enemy. We worshipped NASA and they taught us next to nothing about the Russian space program. People worried that some young person would turn into a drug fiend. Get hooked on smack. Or take too much LSD and go insane. 👍😍💕

Regular flu season kills 250 to 500k per year globally. So this was 4x as deadly.

Still not as deadly as COVID.

Infographic of pandemics...

On the Cape in the summer, Ptown was filled with artists, hippies and homos. I was a kid and thought it was a paradise. My father loved giving rides to grungy young hitchhikers. He was nice to everyone. I though the hippies and homos were very exciting. My father called the homos "fruits" when they weren't in earshot, but he was nice and generous to them. I think his brother was gay but nobody knew of course. My dad was a liberal nerd. Engineers could be like that. They aren't so emotional. If we were driving a long distance he would stop at those highway drive ins and invite the hitchhikers to eat with us. They were poor. People didn't have throwaway money like many do today.

OP is an obvious Covid denier.

We see you, bitch.

I turned 13 in late 1968, and I remember life going on as usual in Brooklyn.

My school didn’t shut down, I hung out as usual with my friends, family parties and weddings were held, and I even attended my first Major League Baseball game in the summer of 1969.

R19 that is an interesting graphic. COVID is the first modern era pandemic with internet and advanced technology and medical care. It would be interesting to know what the growth of COVID would have been like 100 years ago. Would it be similar to the Spanish flu?

he 1968 pandemic was caused by an influenza A (H3N2) virus comprised of two genes from an avian influenza A virus, including a new H3 hemagglutinin, but also contained the N2 neuraminidase from the 1957 H2N2 virus. It was first noted in the United States in September 1968. The estimated number of deaths was 1 million worldwide and about 100,000 in the United States. Most excess deaths were in people 65 years and older. The H3N2 virus continues to circulate worldwide as a seasonal influenza A virus. Seasonal H3N2 viruses, which are associated with severe illness in older people, undergo regular antigenic drift.

I remember having it as a kid. Just got very sick with a high temperature.

According to Wikipedia, Tallulah Bankhead died of double pneumonia, emphysema, malnutrition, and possibly a strain of the flu. She was 66-years-old.

Former CIA Director Allen Dulles died of pneumonia and the flu at age 77

I do not remember it at all. In 1968 I was in jr high in LA and rode my 10 speed to a “Summer of Love” event. Then we moved to Wisconsin. During the summer of 1969 while camping in Door County and listening to a huge transistor radio, we heard of the Tate murders. My Dad proclaimed “Thank God we left LA.”

In 1968/1969 my parents and we teens were just concerned the fricken VietNam war. My Mom would weep while reading the LA Times lower-page spot called “Southland men killed in action.” My older brother was in the draft but he had a high number.

So I don’t remember the late-sixties flu at all.

R18, even that’s overstating it. The Hong Kong flu lasted from 1968 to 1970, two flu seasons. So it was maybe 500,000 a year. And one million was the total worldwide death rate (estimated by the CDC), not just in the U.S. It could be treated by antibiotics, so there were a lot less deaths than in 1918. And the vaccination came out pretty quickly, since it was based on the annual flu vaccine. The Hong Kong flu was spread by soldiers coming back from Vietnam, going through Hong Kong and bringing it to the U.S. A lot of the deaths were in Hong Kong and China.

Hong Kong flu: 500,000 deaths a year worldwide

Covid: 500,000 deaths a year in the U.S. alone.

I should have mentioned, the Covid deaths were with lockdowns, with schools closed for months, with travel curtailed, with thousands of ventilators available, with drugs that didn’t exist in 1968. Without these things, it would have been much worse.

Probably I was one of those 4 million who died and came back in this life 20 years later!!! Nothing to remember, to be honest.

I was born in the summer of 1968 and caught it at 7 months old in 1969. Apparently i was. in hospital about 2 weeks, neither my Mother or Father caught it as they'd had the 1957 Asian H3N2 flu.

On the plus side I've never contracted a H3N2 like virus since.

I turned 40 back when the Hong Kong flu hit and life kept going.

In 1969, I remember the Vietnam war, the Stonewall riots, Charles Manson and his murdering crew, Judy Garland’s death, the death of Brian Jones, Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, the NY Mets winning the World Series, the trial of the Chicago 7, the deaths at Altamont, Barbra Streisand and Katharine Hepburn sharing the Best Actress Oscar, Ted Kennedy driving off the bridge on Chappaquiddick Island.

The Hong Kong flu? Not so much.

[quote] I was in jr high in LA and rode my 10 speed to a “Summer of Love” event. Then we moved to Wisconsin.

Jesus. That must’ve been a helluva culture shock.

[quote] I turned 40 back when the Hong Kong flu hit

So you’re almost 100?!

I was a teen.

The Hong Kong Flu was devastating but had ZERO impact on daily life. None at all.

And you have to remember that the US had a much smaller population back then so seen in context those numbers of deaths were higher than COVID.

And even 1958 ...no one seems to be aware that the US went through a terrible pandemic then too. But no masks or schools closed. Absolutely no disruption of daily life.

Woodstock 1969: What Me Worry?

Yoko was Patient Zero.

Tuberculosis is the most deadly disease ever, it's been documented as existing for 6,000 years and still kills 1.5 million people every year. That's after almost 70 years of vaccination and effective treatments.

If we can't limit the spread of that further I don't hold out much hope regarding Covid19.

Tallulah Bankhead died from the Hong Kong flu though some dispute it, she did.

People made jokes about the HK flu but no one in my family got it. I must have gotten the shot. I was twelve. Oh yeah, I got mumps, no flu.

I was 8 (like R15) and was living in Australia at the time - and I don't remember it at all...

R38 I thought I was the deadliest disease!

How could Tallulah Bankhead have been malnourished?

I was a teen and got it. I had a very high fever for a few days. People talked about it but since it killed mostly old people I didn’t think about it much. It also wasn’t a new disease no one knew anything about. I think that’s why COVID has hit harder. Dying from COVID also seems more terrible. Dying from flu was like dying from pneumonia.

I was a toddler, and both my siblings and my mother got it. So my grandmother flew out from the Midwest to care for us, and SHE got it. My father and I were the only two who didn't get it. My father said later he was sure at least one of the four in the family who were infected was going to die, but we all survived.

I remember seeing something about HK flu shot in the pediatrician's booklet my mom kept with my vaccine records. I was 5 in '69. My only memories from the time are Bobby Kennedy's funeral coverage that my shocked parents watched and daily death and MIA counts on the Huntly Brinkley report. And the 70s hadn't started. What a time to be a child.

I was a 19 year old - very healthy fit one - in early 1970 when I got it. I have since read that the Hong Kong flu first hit in 1968 went into remission or whatever and re-emerged in late 1969-1970.

I was in Upstate NY and very active in college and in bars etc. I woke up one morning late January or early February and vomited for 5 hours - violently and painfully and eventually with just bile cause I had nothing left to vomit. After that subsided I stayed in bed for 3 days weak as imaginable. Someone brought me tea and a piece of toast regularly for some nourishment and I'd force myself to take a sip and one bite. But I was essentially wiped out. The evening of the 3d day I was able to get up and I ate some mashed potatoes. I totally understand how elderly people could die of this.

I don't remember if anyone around me also got sick or any news of it. But people should remember we didn't have the kind of news we have now. There were 3 maybe one or two more TV channels in bigger cities. There were lots of bigger issues the news was preoccupied with. I also don't remember if it took a while to recover from or I just felt ok as soon as it passed. Don't remember if I had a fever. Don't even remember if any friends got it or if it caused any issues in my world like school attendance, etc.

Because of my experience I started getting the flu shot without fail as soon as it became readily available. I recently saw my father's military Vaccination Record card and he was getting the influenza shot in the 1950s. I didn't even know they had one then.

[quote] How could Tallulah Bankhead have been malnourished?

Many old and/or sick people have no appetite. They just don't want to eat.

But her nursing home would have put her on IVs.

I was going through puberty so I had other things on my mind.

The flu is less contagious than COVID because mask wearing has really cut back on cases. Meanwhile we get 100k cases of COVID daily.

My parents had it. I was four. I just remember it interfering with Christmas. It was definitely a thing but not to the degree this is, likely because it was less deadly. Overseas travel was not as prevalent and disease was slower to spread from one part of the world to another.

[quote] But her nursing home would have put her on IVs.

She wasn't in a nursing home.

I am only 43 and I went to San Francisco in 2009 and also to Italy in 2011 and had both the swine flu and the Peking flu...many had it. I survived thank God.

"How could Tallulah Bankhead have been malnourished?"

It's a common fact that nicotine and bourbon do not supply daily vitamin needs recommended USDA.