Maybe not even pre internet, just pre widespread broadband and the software to facilitate working at home.(I know there are still lots of people unable to work at home)
But if this had happened in say 1995. I’ve been at home since April, but this would not have been possible in the same job in 1995.
Would things like masks and social distancing have gone over better in a world where people weren’t passing along conspiracy theories over social media? Would Washington have just bitten the bullet and passed real stimulus aid to get people through? (Don’t laugh. I was 22 in 1995 and well remember it was the height of Gingrich and Contract with America).
You’d have to make it earlier than that. I was on the Internet in 1995, it wasn’t even new then. I had a UNIX PC and could do a lot of my work from home, though video calls could only be done in expensive rooms. There were primitive video phones back then, and maybe a pandemic would have accelerated their use.
Before the Web really caught on, there was a worry about PCs not really being good for anything. This would have accelerated the use of laptops to allow more people to bring their work home.
But you’re right, there were more manufacturing jobs then, and less of the economy was the kind of stuff that the internet enabled. The crash would have been much worse than today.
There was a smaller anti-science movement then, though there were still plenty of cranks on Usenet.
Worst of all - and this is not tied to the Internet but is tied to computation - we didn’t understand DNA sequencing back then nearly so well as today, so it would take a lot longer to get a vaccine.
I’m not sure social distancing would even have become a thing in a pre-Internet world. Cancelling large public events, sure; temporary school / workplace closures in hard-hit areas, also possible. But telling everybody to stay home and not have close contact with anybody outside of their household, for months on end, would have been so obviously impractical that I doubt that it would have occurred to anybody to try.
It was surprisingly just like today. Masks, social distancing, cancelled events, news sources supressing the truth, rumors and stories and other falsehoods spreading almost as fast as the virus, and of course people that “knew better”" and didn’t act in a safe manner and caused super spreader events.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
No internet means no Amazon, etc. Of course you could buy stuff by phone and have it delivered, but not nearly as efficiently as today. Furthermore working from home would have been impossible for most jobs. We wouldn’t have been able to sustain a quarantine for very long.
On the plus side, there were fewer sources of information. Assuming we didn’t have Donald Trump as president pre-internet, most sources of info would have been accurate. Hopefully that would make up for the shorter quarantines.
There still would have been resistance. There always is. Newspapers and pamphlets were mass communication methods. So was artwork:
