Yeah. Compare the current situation with the 1968 Hong Kong flu (1 million deaths). Not only the media treated it lightly, but so did the people:
(MSM article)
When Europe didn't care about epidemics...
The 1968 flu killed a million people, with general indifference. How and why, fifty years apart, is society reacting in diametrically opposed ways to the danger of an epidemic?
1969. Europe has its eyes riveted on the Vietnam War, the Biafra disaster, the upheavals of May 68, man's first steps on the Moon. In the frenzy of the "Trente Glorieuses", the Old Continent could not let a virus come and spoil the atmosphere. It therefore turned its eyes away from the hospitals and their share of misery. And yet, these hospitals are counting the dead.
The fault lies with the Hong Kong flu, also known as the '68 flu, the year it appeared in Asia. At the end of 1968, the virus arrived in the United States, killing more than 50,000 people in three months. At the beginning of 1969, it invaded Europe and took a summer break before causing a massacre at the turn of 1969-1970: 35,000 deaths in France in two months. It did not spare Great Britain and even crossed the Iron Curtain.
Quoted by the daily newspaper LibƩration in an article written in 2005, a doctor from Nice remembers: "People arrived on stretchers, in a catastrophic state. They were dying of pulmonary haemorrhage, their lips cyanotic, all grey. There was no time to get the dead out. They were crammed into a room at the back of the ICU. And then we'd take them out when we could, during the day, at night."
The '68 flu kills about a million people, according to WHO estimates, and thus takes its place on the macabre podium of the 20th century's most deadly flues, after the "Spanish flu" (20 to 40 million deaths in 1918-1920) and the "Asian flu" (2 million deaths in 1957).
"The last Christmas present"
Yet
neither the authorities, the public nor the media cared. On the contrary, the tone is light, even jolly: "A TV news presenter talks about the '68 flu as the last Christmas present that made millions sick and some dead," says medical historian Bernardino Fantini. The press is no exception.
Reactions in the extreme opposite of those of today, where news is dissected, relayed, sometimes crushed in the machine to the lies of social networks. These are all anxiety-provoking factors that did not exist in 1969. Georges, a 78-year-old Valaisan, recalls: "
We had no specific recommendations and no statistics on the number of deaths from the authorities. It was the good old days when even the imminent dangers went unnoticed by the common man."
"Even the deaths of the elderly became a scandal."
How can such a social transformation be explained in the space of fifty years, when we move from carelessness to collective terror? Certainly, it was a virulent flu, not an unknown virus, and its speed of spread was slower. But
these two episodes nevertheless reveal profound changes in our relationship with death, control and individualism. "This change in social attitudes is primarily linked to life expectancy," explains Bernardino Fantini. At the time, people over 65 were considered survivors of natural mortality. Today, even the death of the elderly has become a scandal."
The right to health, affirmed in 1948 by the WHO, gained this status in the 1980s," he says.
It is felt to be a personal right and must therefore be guaranteed by the state. Whereas in previous centuries, death was accepted: people died in war, they died for God, no one had a problem with it."
At most, human beings were looking for the causes of disease... Bernardino Fantini has listed the various causes put forward by our medieval ancestors to explain the Black Death:
divine punishment, of course, but also the stars - a bad conjunction of Mars and Venus -, putrid zones, the vengeance of enemies, contact with animals, which would lead to the persecution of cats.
But despite the search for culprits, fatalism remains a refuge.
The Enlightenment extinguishes fatalism
The dispute between Rousseau and Voltaire over the Lisbon earthquake is revealing," recalls Dominique Bourg, philosopher and honorary professor at the University of Lausanne.
By refusing fatalism, Rousseau prefigures modernity. Modernity is becoming a permanent feature of post-war Western society."
The movement is also supported by the advent of antibiotics after the Second World War. "Before that, tuberculosis and other diseases were considered fatal because they were incurable," explains Bernardino Fantini. Smallpox during epidemics killed two out of five children. Death came at any age."
In a few years, the perspective changes completely. You go from resignation to overconfidence. The turning point was 1979, when the WHO declared smallpox eradicated. From then on, humans felt that they were capable of defeating disease. A profession of faith that HIV will undermine, then Ebola. The coronavirus is the last nail in the coffin of this illusion.
Yet society refuses to rethink its relationship to death. "After the war, with the disappearance of infant mortality and the increase in comfort, the West is gradually developing the idea of a guaranteed existence capital," explains Dominique Bourg. We think that only the carelessness of others can lead you to ruin this capital."
Hence the very strong governmental reactions that impose lockdown. Is it the consequence of an unprecedented imperative in the history of mankind: to save everyone? Criticizing liberalism, the philosopher doubts it and warns:
"In the 1990s, a cynicism also appeared, claiming that a part of humanity could disappear without damage. Neo-liberalism is total Darwinism. If the neoliberal and populist wave spreads, this vision could prevail within a few years."
We're not there yet. But already, voices are being raised to ensure that the consequences of economic collapse will be more deadly than the virus.
"Our age no longer tolerates failure, offense, or obstacles."
Enzo Santacroce, a liberal philosophy teacher in a Waldensian gymnasium, sees lockdown as an almost Promethean ambition: "These prudent measures are the result of pride in remaining in control, in wanting to eradicate death and suffering from the human condition, realities that are intolerable today, but which were still tolerable in 1968. Even if this means putting the economy on the back burner, as if in penance.
This is all the more difficult in this century of "perpetual euphoria", a thesis by Pascal Bruckner, as the professor reminds us: "Our era can no longer tolerate failure, offence or obstacles.
From the Enlightenment, which thought that happiness on earth was possible, we have moved on to the imperative of being happy. The coronavirus is a blow of fate experienced as an offence."
We feel that, in addition to health concerns,
there is a deeper anxiety, perhaps stemming from this threat to a happiness that we thought we had taken for granted. "It is then necessary to remember, with Blaise Pascal, that there is greatness in recognising that one is small, and that the threat can also lead to finding resources," Enzo Santacroce concludes. From a contemporary illusion that is coming to an end could resurface a philosophical response that is too quickly forgotten.
and the law is you will get shot; where you get shot determines if I'll be asking you any questions. 
