https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/08/america-needs-to-stop-reacting-to-coronavirus-like-a-bunch-of-hysterics/
Americans are learning how to cope with the virus in a common-sense way. That doesn’t mean being reckless, but neither does it mean cowering inside every day of every week and every month unless a vaccine shows up.
Harvard University recently announced that it will ban students from in-person classes for the entirety of the next academic year. The decision, not based on science, is typical of the decisions made by many elites in response to the novel coronavirus sweeping the globe.
Global pandemics aren’t new, but the way many Americans are responding to this one is. Americans have been blessed to experience few pandemics in recent decades. The swine flu of 2009 was no fun, as my husband can attest, but it resulted in only 273,304 hospitalizations and 12,469 deaths in the United States. The Wuhan virus hospitalizations and deaths have eclipsed those numbers many times over.
But from 1918 to 1968, pandemics, deadly flus, and horrific childhood diseases were much more common. When the Asian flu hit the United States in 1957, during the Eisenhower administration, it was just the latest contagion college students had faced in a lifetime of contagious diseases. The 1957 Asian flu killed 116,000 Americans at a time the U.S. population was 172 million, just more than half the current population. That would be the equivalent of 222,000 Americans today. By comparison, the coronavirus has killed 133,000 Americans thus far.
By the time the Asian flu came along in 1957, many college students had already battled measles, mumps, chicken pox, German measles, and polio. For many years, there were no vaccines for these things. The parents of these college students had battled diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhoid fever, pneumonia, and the Spanish flu that killed 675,000 Americans and more than 50 million across the world. In today’s terms, that would be the equivalent of more than 1.6 million Americans dying from coronavirus.
There were brief, localized school closures in 1957 but the epidemic barely formed a blip in the American consciousness. It didn’t even elicit much of a mention in major Eisenhower biographies. Even the horrific Spanish flu was not a major media event. There is no historic record of President Woodrow Wilson even publicly mentioning the flu, which killed more than 0.5 percent of the U.S. population.
The 1968 Hong Kong flu was also bad, killing about 100,000 Americans when the population was just 60 percent of what it is now.
