Niall Ferguson: How Ike's 1950s America Beat The 'Asian Flu' With Science & Common Sense

Zero Hedge: May 2, 2021: This essay is adapted from Mr. Ferguson’s new book, “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe,” which will be published by Penguin Press on May 4. 

In 1957, the U.S. rose to the challenge of the ‘Asian flu’ with stoicism and a high tolerance for risk, offering a stark contrast with today’s approach to Covid-19...

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"Even though freedom is its own wondrous virtue, even though freedom produces essential information that protects us, and even though free people produce the resources without which diseases kill with sickening rapidity, panicky politicians erased it in 2020 on the supposition that personal and economic desperation were the best solution for a spreading coronavirus. Historians will marvel at the abject stupidity of the political class in 2020."

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Comparing Covid-19 With the Flu

According to the Covid19 Dashboard maintained by folks at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the world-wide Covid-19 death toll to date is 252,000.

How does that compare with the seasonal flu?

According to a paper entitled Global mortality associated with seasonal influenza epidemics, authored by an international group headed by John Paget of the Netherlands Institute for Health Services, it compares rather modestly, although obviously the final total will be higher.

 According to that paper, which was published last December, during the period 2002-2011:

an average of 389 000 (uncertainty range 294 000-518 000) respiratory deaths were associated with influenza globally each year during the study period, corresponding to ~ 2% of all annual respiratory deaths. Of these, 67% were among people 65 years and older.

So the mortality due to the seasonal flu has averaged 0.05% of the world's population, versus Covid-19's toll thus far of just 0.03%. If the final toll for Covid-19 is twice the toll thus far, then, at 0.06% it will slightly exceed the estimated death toll from flu in the worst year during the period 2002-2011, but it will likely come far short of the worst flu seasons in living memory.

Among the most deadly flu seasons was the year of the Asian flu (1957/58) that killed 70,000 out of 149 million Americans for a death rate of 0.05%, and 1968, the year of the Hong Kong flu (H3N2 virus), which also killed about one out of every two thousand Americans. A final American death toll from Covid-19 of 0.05% would be 280,000, or almost four times the current total. To match the lethality of the Spanish flu of 1918, the death toll would have to be in excess of a million and a half.

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