If Coronavirus happened 25 years ago

Good points made. People travelled, but nothing like a few years ago when my friends would take their kidx overseas at least once a year, if not every scool holidays. In 96 most of us still had fresh memories of recession.
It's all the travel which has spread it and led to the mutations. Just like the trzvel at the end of WWI which was the most anyone had ever tr a velled before at that point.
But we were getting good with International students back then and bird flu, swine flu and or SARS were in the community. Pretth sure I caught one of them - someone told me swine flu by memory. Not nice.As mentioned, most of the time people would have caught it and recovered or caught it and died and most of us were none the wiser.

 

It is likely to never have left Wuhan. The rest of the world would never have heard about it.

Had it escaped to other parts of the world, it may well have been a non event here like SARS of 2003.

If it had managed to arrive here with a vengeance, with no means of mass testing (not possible in 1996) nor contact tracing, medicos and the authorities would have been flying blind. Lockdowns/masks would only have been effected after they saw mass casualties and flooding of hospitals. Spanish flu situation but likely lower mortality due to better nutrition/living conditions/medical care

 

It did happen 18 years ago, and 18 years ago China took 5 months to report it and for lockdown to occur. China also under reported cases then. But then no-body was willing to old China to account, so a repeat has happened. That time the death rate was 10% for infected people . That is why we have vaccines now. they were already advanced enough for trials to begin when Corona broke out again in 2019. They were 18 years in the making. The Australian one QU failed the trials because people who had it gave positive results for HIV and it would have made HIV testing useless. But some how Scomo was supposed to have foreseen this.

 

Some of these memory lanes take me back!

In 1990/1 summer I went on trip to Italy over the summer holidays with part exchange/part sight seeing between year 11 and 12. That was my first time on a plane but it wasn't insanely expensive. There were definitely kids at my high school that went to Bali for holidays. In the mid 90s I flew interstate from Perth to East coast probably once a year for work, conference or to see friends. Price of a plane ticket was around $600 return so again not too insane.

I got my first mobile phone in 1993 and went to work for an internet service provider in 1994. I was able to use a modem and dial into the ISP/work and check on the servers via a laptop from home - hello unix and telnet I've had an Ebay account since 2000 and my Paypal account was created in 2001.

1997 saw the Bird/Avian Fly "potential" pandemic. Thankfully it's ability to transmit from person to person was not great and once all the infected birds were killed it died out.

Our simpler lives probably could have coped with a pandemic a lot better in terms of coping with a lockdown. We would have been happy to wait a week for something to arrive, we would have not had some much fake news. The medical side of it would have been hard though, technology has given us a lot of gains in health sciences since then.

 

I think backyard camping trips will be the new rage.

You can turn it into something special.

Load up the car. Lock the house up. Reverse up the driveway to the backyard. Unpack and pitch the tent. Get the Billie out. Ooh yeah look at the stars.

 

Oh yes. We would have had skies of stars back in the 1990's in Sydney. Slowly the night sky becomes less star filled...

 

Plenty of global travel in the 90s, I did 4 RTW trips.

The most damaging thing re. Covid in the current era is Facebook, they should shut it down for a while, so much anti-vax crap on there from "friends", its causing a lot of harm.

 

I'm pretty well educated for my age and we had early internet with "unlimited coax" in 1997. I had heard Spanish Flu mentioned being overseas but until just recently I didnt know it was ever in Australia. The only photos I ever saw of nurses or hospitals during that era were war casualties and the staff did not have masks.

 

All my fb friends are pro vaccine, pro mask, stay home ... perhaps you need new friends

 

Please note that everyone on PC are entrepreneurs and you think and act differently from the masses. Just because some of you travelled overseas when you were younger does not equate to the current lifestyle of typical "Travel Guide" ozzies for whom regular travel to Thailand and Bali is now a norm. Yes, there were people who travelled extensively 25 years ago, but they would not be the majority.

 

Or @Casteller does.

 

??? what does this have to do with my life in 1996? I was the only one of my friends that year who had coax rather than dial up. We didnt search for Spanish Flu though, did you?

 

And some things never change no matter the pandemic.

 

Yes agree with you. Just a little background, my parents had 4 kids. It was too expensive for my parents to take us all on a plane. The first holiday they did on a plane was in January 1994 which was to Tasmania. They didn't take my older sister or me because we were over 12 and we would have been charged adult fares. So I got stuck with an aunty for a week. It was like I was stuck in quarantine. Didn't even go out to their local shopping centre that week. Meanwhile, the Sydney bushfires happened, and Tasmania had summertime snow. Anyway, did my family visit the Cabury chocolate factory while there? No. I don't really know what they did during that week.

Anyway, contrast to January 2020. My sister takes her family for a 4 week European holiday. This is after they had had family holidays to Japan, NZ, Thailand, Fiji, Singapore, Vietnam IIRC.... Kids are still in primary school. Nothing wrong with either approach, but times have changed.

Also a few of my nieces year 6 classmates went to China for the 2019-2020 school holiday break. They had to quarantine and miss the beginning of school when school resumed. It would not have been so common 25 years ago.

 

You forgot the beer & BBQ

 

However, given the size of some house blocks today the kids will ask "What's a backyard, Daddy?"

 

Both myself & Hubby had mobiles 25 years ago. They were a lot more expensive. Bought our first IP back then, searching through listings on RE.Com, although we had dial up.

 

What's a caravan?

Growing up, we had regular holidays, but parents booked motels. As an adult, we did similar. All Aussie holidays, but none of that camping or caravanning lark. As all our holidays backed onto skating competitions, we had to get a good night sleep.

 

Did RE.com exist back then? "Homes Pictorial" was the usual local advertising for homes in my neighborhood. Big fat magazine in black and white, ads about half a size of a mobile phone screen, lots of cryptic abbreviated words as you had to pay for the space, space for 1 pic. No maps to show the location in the neighbourhood and no floor plans.

 

Yep, pretty basic though. I can't remember exactly what was on offer, but I do remember looking for homes online and came to the conclusion that Campbelltown was relatively close to home (Wollongong) and we might be able to get something that we could afford that was cf+. We then followed that up with multiple visits to the area looking at properties.