Originally Posted by
galaxy flyer
It was behind a paywall but I did look up a few other articles about the 1957 and 1968 pandemics. Unfortunately most were a year old but this piece and many others pointed out that those pandemics were not as deadly or as transmissible as covid. Also, 65 years ago we did not have things like zoom, uber, grocery deliveries, the ability for many to work from home, or nearly the overall level of medicine as we do today that allowed us to try to implement the mitigation strategies that we have against Covid.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-11/covid-19-was-far-deadlier-than-the-1957-and-1968-flu-pandemics
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/10/world/coronavirus-history.html
Also. I just got around the paywall. And this is a bolder, emphasized, individual paragraph by the author.....very scientific.....plus half of the article is spent gushing over Elvis and the dreamy memory of the 1950s.
“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.”
Another interesting tidbit about Niall Ferguson
Ferguson sometimes champions counterfactual history, also known as "speculative" or "hypothetical" history, and edited a collection of essays, titled Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (1997), exploring the subject.
I wouldn’t take that WSJ for anything more than an opinion piece and an effort to sell his next book where the essay came from, as mentioned in the footnotes of the article.