Don’t know about the flu pandemic, but I do know anytime the government closed the one room schoolhouse the kids just came to grandma’s place, since she was the teacher.
She said it was a good thing, too... otherwise a couple would have gone hungry.
I’m really amazed when folks talk “history” that isn’t past two generations ago that they don’t make the connection that their grandparents were there, or incorporate any of what they told them into casting a skeptical eye on anything written today about it.
We were chatting with Karen’s mom about polio and what she remembered. Karen’s grandma had no idea what to do so she’d tell the kids to take an extra nap after washing up after school.
Apparently in some weird way she thought extra sleep would make them stronger and more resistant.
There’s very little that applies from even two generations ago. That guy owned a Model T.
The Wrights had only flown their kite 10 years prior.
We have people who can’t even think about owning a vehicle without 22 airbags. Not so much amongst pilots, but check out car buying forums sometime.
There’s always at least one buyer more than willing to risk personal bankruptcy for a car with a good crash rating.
My grandfather drove trucks in the 50s. He recounted that if you came upon a bad accident at night any distance from a town, your role was pretty much to take the dying words of the driver to their family. The steering column was probably run through their chest.
Not that long ago. And yeah I know a lot of folks didn’t know their grandparents — I just wonder where the other half disappears to when they read stuff like that article and don’t say, “Ummm, nobody knew who that agency was back then. Heck nobody knows who it was now! That was three decades before income taxes. Nothing was very big in government back then.”
LOL
History is interesting that way how it gets rewritten over time. Doesn’t seem to take even getting past the generation who knew people from the one being discussed.
Since the beginning of this pandemic, I've been casually comparing it to others I've lived through. When all is said and done and more complete data is available, I'll probably do some more serious comparisons; but for now, it's more of a morbid type of reminiscing.
When I was a kid, polio was still somewhere between rare and unusual, depending on where one lived. I lived in New York City (Brooklyn, specifically), so it was unusual. Most kids had been vaccinated, but the Salk vaccine was less-than-perfect. Given the population density and the sheer number of people -- the borough of Brooklyn alone was the fourth-largest city in America at the time and one of the most densely-populated -- there were enough cases that most of us knew at least a few people who got it by the time more-effective vaccines came out in the 1970's and we were all re-vaccinated.
I also lived through the Hong Kong flu pandemic of 1968. By the time that pandemic ran its course, we all knew quite a few people who had gotten it, as well as a few who died from it. Most were elderly people whom we knew well enough to know who they were when we learned of their deaths; but there were a few kids, too. If they were Catholic, the school would drag us all to their funerals, just in case the nuns themselves and their yardsticks and pointers didn't inspire sufficient terror in us on a daily basis.
The one thing my little clique of kids noticed even then was that the kids who died were
always the kids who "never came out and played." We knew them from school, but we never had any contact with them outside of school. Back then we called them "sissies" or "mama's boys" because their mothers used to pick them up from school and walk them home every day. That was unusual for kids older than five back then.
The rest of us would play baseball or football in glass-strewn sandlots, build forts out of shipping pallets and throw balls of dirt at each other, explore the abandoned (save for the rats and a few bums) tunnels
under Brooklyn that dated back to WWI and WWII, hang out in fallout shelters, pee (and occasionally ****) in alleys, drink from public water fountains, and swim naked in the East River. But we never got sick. The kids who got sick were always the ones who disappeared into their apartments after school and didn't reappear until the next morning.
That has always led me to wonder if the hyper-hygienic habits of modern people (and especially of parents toward their children) have contributed to decreased competency of their immune systems. Even before this pandemic, I couldn't help but notice how often so many people broke out hand their tubes and bottles of hand sanitizer and wiped down their hands and faces and those of their children, for no apparent reason, with a frequency that bordered on OCD behavior.
When I was a very young child, our parents encouraged us to sit in mud puddles and play. It would "make us strong," they said. I never understood why that would be the case, but I was happy to play in the mud. Maybe they were right, though. Maybe the soil contained enough ancestral pathogens of generations past to put our immune systems into decathlon-training mode.
Technically the majority of the thirty or forty food plants that have gone down are rural.
The rural areas with large plants that employ the majority of the town, or in one case here, where the prison is located and everyone works for the prison... and everybody needs the job... and they’re “essential”... those rural towns also all eventually go down.
And by down we mean the whole town gets sick, the plant closes, a few die, everything gets disinfected, and everybody goes back to work. With no guarantee of immunity. But re-outbreaks in tight facilities like that will tell the take before the labs know. By the time we hear of second and third plant or prison outbreaks, it’ll be September.
So far when it isn’t in a nursing home, or as one guy today put it, the “old folks home, because nursing sounds nicer but isn’t the majority”, the infected to dead ratio is about the same at the small town plants as the big city outbreaks.
Which continues evidence that it’s going to kill whomever it’s going to kill. It’ll maim a whole bunch too. Low O2 levels don’t do various body parts much good.
I am wondering if the era of the half million dollar “starter house” in this area is finally over with. LOL. That wasn’t sustainable before 1/5 of the country went unemployed.
Saw an article that banks are slashing their made up “credit scores” like crazy. First thought was, “Duh.” With those silly things tied to all sorts of products, including housing and insurance, the secondary effects will be harsh and impressive. In a bad way.
Well, jails and prisons can be considered "urban" no matter what surrounds them. But they're hardly closed societies. Both visitors and staff are vectors of whatever is getting passed around inside the prisons to the general public (and vice-versa).
Food plants are a tougher call. The better ones are cleaner than some operating rooms I've been in. The worst ones are places that make you not want to eat for a while.
I was a pest control operator in college and for quite some time afterward until I migrated into IT. I can tell you first-hand that food plants range from hell holes employing mainly illegal aliens who can't afford to raise a stink over the conditions, to places I couldn't enter without going through a ritual as thorough as surgeons do when preparing for surgery.
Even the better plants, however, didn't pay very well. I could tell by the jalopies parked in the employee parking lots and the number of employees who crammed themselves into those jalopies and "car-pooled" to work, although I tend to think of that term as referring to something one does voluntarily rather than out of necessity. Suffice it to say that the employees looked pretty poor to me.
So how do these employees live at home? Do they chip in and pack themselves into rented houses, apartments, and trailers, sharing even the same beds in shifts? I really don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me if they do; and if they do, they're effectively creating little pockets of urban contagion within rural areas.
In one way, it doesn't matter where they got infected. The idea is to keep the pathogen out of the plant. But in another way, it does matter. If they're being infected at home because of economic factors, then that in itself becomes a public health issue that needs to be addressed.
Unfortunately, the debate would be too politically-polarizing for any good solution to emerge.
Rich
