Đại dịch cúm 1957–1958

mà hồi đấy có 'giãn cách xã hội đâu', (vì những chính sách như vậy là vô ích, virus đã tồn tại trong cộng đồng và lây lan rồi)...

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Jeffrey Tucker looks back at the 1957-58 Asian flu pandemic: there were no lockdowns (phong tỏa). A slice:

The Asian flu (cúm) of 1957-58 was a deadly pandemic (đại dịch chết người) with a broader (rộng hơn) reach for severe outcomes (hậu quả tàn khốc) than Covid-19 of 2020. It killed between 1 and 4 million people worldwide, and 116,000 in the US in a time with half the population. It was a leading contributor to a year in which the US saw 62,000 excess deaths.

Globally (trên toàn cầu), it might have been five times as deadly as Covid-19 (nguy hiểm gấp 5 lần covid), as measured by deaths per capita (số người chết trên đầu người). It was unusually lethal (gây chết người) for younger people: 40 percent of deaths had occurred among people younger than 65, whereas the average age of death Covid-19 is 80 with only 10-20% of deaths under the age of 65.

What’s striking (nổi bật, đập vào mắt, thu hút sự chú ý, thu hút sự quan tâm; đáng chú ý, gây ấn tượng) is how public health officials (viên chức y tế cộng đồng) handled (xử lý, giải quyết) the pandemic. It had a diametrically (hoàn toàn, tuyệt đối) opposite response (ứng phó trái ngược) than policymakers (nhà lập chính sách) pursued (theo đuổi) in 2020. One might assume that this was due to negligence (cẩu thả, lơ đễnh, sơ suất) and a lack of sophistication in understanding the need to lockdown. Surely they didn’t know 65 years ago what we know today!

Actually, this is completely false. Public health experts did in fact consider school closures, business closures, and a ban of public events but the entire ethos of the profession rejected them. There were two grounds for this rejection: lockdowns would be too disruptive, disabling the capacity of medical professionals to deal competently with the crisis (cuộc khủng hoảng), and also because such policies would be futile (vô ích, vô vọng) because the virus was already here and spreading (lây lan).

Bài trước: Chúng ta mất trí rồi