Comparing Covid-19 with the 1957 Asian Flu

We all love analogies. What would we do without them? Ever since we took high school tests requiring us to compare and contrast this and that, we are happy to form judgments about the present by comparing and contrasting it with the past.

Now, in an essay adapted from his So does in an essay adapted from his new forthcoming book, Doom, economic historian Niall Ferguson draws some salient analogies. . A prodigiously prolific writer, Ferguson compares the way today’s Americans have dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic with the way the Eisenhower administration dealt with the Asian flu pandemic of 1957-58. 

It is, Ferguson explains, a better comparison than the Spanish flu of 1918. Still and all, the Asian flu mostly affected young people, while Covid-19 seems disproportionately to target the elderly. As for the body counts, they are roughly comparable, though the current virus has not yet finished its work. 

More interesting is Ferguson’s rendering of the different policy responses. In the fifties, our president was Dwight Eisenhower. Now our presidents have been Donald Trump and Joe Biden. One thing is clear, during the Eisenhower administration neither political party was playing politics with the pandemic. Now one has the distinct impression that both parties are playing politics with the disease.

What did Ike do? Clearly, he did not shut the country down and did not kill the economy and did not declare an emergency. Even though the risk was disproportionately directed at the young, he did not close any schools.

The policy response of President Dwight Eisenhower could hardly have been more different from the response of 2020. Eisenhower did not declare a state of emergency. There were no state lockdowns and, despite the first wave of teenage illness, no school closures. Sick students simply stayed at home, as they usually did. Work continued more or less uninterrupted.

Given that telecommuting was still in dream stage, people continued to go to work. Thus, government was not required to juice the economy with massive infusions of money:

With workplaces open, the Eisenhower administration saw no need to borrow to the hilt to fund transfers and loans to citizens and businesses. The president asked Congress for a mere $2.5 million ($23 million in today’s inflation-adjusted terms) to provide additional support to the Public Health Service. There was a recession that year, but it had little if anything to do with the pandemic. The Congressional Budget Office has described the Asian flu as an event that “might not be distinguishable from the normal variation in economic activity.”

As it happened, Ike’s policy prescriptions were based on expert opinion:

President Eisenhower’s decision to keep the country open in 1957-58 was based on expert advice. When the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) concluded in August 1957 that “there is no practical advantage in the closing of schools or the curtailment of public gatherings as it relates to the spread of this disease,” Eisenhower listened. 

Today, of course, no one really trusts the experts. The reason is, most of them seem more concerned with gaining political advantage or advancing a political cause than with fighting the pandemic. If Joe Biden did not see a political advantage in prancing around with a face mask-- a useless appurtenance-- he would not be doing it.

Ferguson then remarks that, however much we are agog over the speed with which our drug companies have manufactured vaccines, the 1950s companies did so with similar speed:

It has become commonplace to describe the speed with which vaccines were devised for Covid-19 as unprecedented. But it was not. The first New York Times report of the outbreak in Hong Kong—three paragraphs on page 3—was on April 17, 1957. By July 26, little more than three months later, doctors at Fort Ord, Calif., began to inoculate recruits to the military.

1950s Americans took it in stride. They did not panic. They did not go all emotional. They did not make it into a cosmic drama.

By Ferguson’s reasoning, with which I concur, today’s Americans have a very low risk tolerance. He does not explain why this is so, and I will offer only a wee bit of speculation. But clearly, the cohort that had defeated the Great Depression and had won World War II saw more value in a cohesive society than does today’s highly individualistic, every person for itself, world. It may be incidental, but, as a rule, and for good Darwinian reasons, women are more risk averse than men. Thus, heightened risk aversion seems to be a characteristic of a more feminized culture.

A striking contrast between 1957 and the present is that Americans today appear to have a much lower tolerance for risk than their grandparents and great-grandparents. As one contemporary recalled, “For those who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s, there was nothing unusual about finding yourself threatened by contagious disease. Mumps, measles, chicken pox and German measles swept through entire schools and towns; I had all four….We took the Asian flu in stride. We said our prayers and took our chances.”

Today's America has a tattered and shredded social fabric. It has been incapable of mounting an organized response. One might add that in the 1950s patriotism was embraced by everyone . Today, it is controversial.

Compare these stoical attitudes with the strange political bifurcation of reactions we saw last year, with Democrats embracing drastic restrictions on social and economic activity, while many Republicans acted as if the virus was a hoax. Perhaps a society with a stronger fabric of family life, community life and church life was better equipped to withstand the anguish of untimely deaths than a society that has, in so many ways, come apart.

Ferguson adds a point that he made elsewhere, namely that today’s government is far less competent than is that of the 1950s. In those halcyon days, most government employees would have had military experience. They would have viscerally respected the leadership of Dwight Eisenhower. Today’s government employees were either Boomers or millennials. They do not know how to organize to win because their experience of warfare has had nothing to do with either organization or victory.

A further contrast between 1957 and 2020 is that the competence of government would appear to have diminished even as its size has expanded. The number of government employees in the U.S., including those in federal, state and local governments, numbered 7.8 million in November 1957 and reached around 22 million in 2020—a nearly threefold increase, compared with a doubling of the population. Federal net outlays were 16.2% of GDP in 1957 versus 20.8% in 2019.

Ferguson concludes:

“To be young was very heaven” in 1957—even with a serious risk of infectious disease (and not just flu; there was also polio and much else). By contrast, to be young in 2020 was—for most American teenagers—rather hellish. Stuck indoors, struggling to concentrate on “distance learning” with irritable parents working from home in the next room, young people experienced at best frustration and at worst mental illness.

We’ve come a long way, don’t you think?