Agreed. Even if we limit it to just the US, this has caused a lot more disruption than 9/11. When Trump gave his speech on 3/11 and the NBA was shutting down, it was obvious this would be worse. Chris Cuomo and Don Lemon on CNN both said WWII as well after Trump’s speech.
Here in Toronto a few of the tallest buildings closed in the wake of 9/11, but outside of that and air traffic shutdown left went on as usual. This is the first major event of this type in my lifetime and I’m going to be 50.
I was in Junior High School when JFK was shot. School closed when his death was announced but I don’t recall the city shutting down. Business continued. Many stores had TVs running. There was shock, not shuttering.
My SIL was at a conference on the far side of the continent from home on 9-11. Airspace was closed. She and her team rented an RV to drive across America rather than flyover. The economy wobbled; our house sold for rather less than expected. Americans got ubiquitous surveillance and a phony war out of it. The butcher’s bill isn’t in yet.
We flew to Central America a few months later but didn’t know if more airspace-closing attacks might occur then so we took traveler’s cheques for busfare back if needed. Apparently local media was confusing; paisanos were sorry for we Yanks, whose country was invaded by Iraq.
MrsRico and I have endured a few local disasters, none that damaged us. COVID is the greatest disruption in our long, not-too-miserable lives. We never fretted before of supply-chain breakdowns, especially for medicines.
No, the planet will not shut down. But it’ll be mighty constricted for awhile.
There is no exact match to this pandemic but I will suggest that the oil crises in the mid-70s approximate this. While certainly there were no social distancing involved and few if any deaths, the social, cultural and economic effects world-wide were noticeable. Kind of like what we are going to go through now. It isn’t a close match but it is a world-wide event that impacted the daily lives of billions of people.
Not a Brit but some descriptions of their Winter of Discontent (1978-79) by those who went through it seem to strike a similar tone.
I’ll let eyewitnesses elaborate on details, but essentially it was a fight between the British Labour government and the unions which ground large parts of the economy to threadbare services.
We had our own Winter of Discount Tents, and some of the savings were truly amazing! [Sorry, couldn’t resist].
Hell I was on the west coast and when we realized planes were not going to crash into buildings all over the US it was relatively normal albeit weird.
It’s certainly not a worldwide thing, but the closest I remember to this level of personal disruption was the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Pretty much everything was closed for a short time as everybody worried about aftershocks, power was out, and it was a mess. But that only lasted a few days before things started to get back to normal, and of course it was very localized.
Loma Prieta was one of the smaller disasters MrsRico and I endured. (Her office tower on mud flats shook but our home on a rocky hill didn’t twitch.) We’ve been through various quakes, floods, wildfires, riots - all with fairly local impacts, some brief, some not. Nothing was as disruptive as COVID.
Considering the total global death toll was over a million, the Hong Kong Flu of 1968 caused very little disruption. I was a child then and I have no memory of anything flu-related. 1968 was Vietnam, Apollo 8, Robert Kennedy and MLK.
That’s the thing; that and most disasters are localized. So if the people in the Bay Area need something after an earthquake like that one, it can come from unaffected parts of the country. In the current situation, however, virtually the entire country and much of the world is affected in the same way. So, for example, the shortage of ventilators has no quick solution.
The closest thing in my lifetime was the Blizzard of 1978. It shutdown huge portions of the US midwest, east, and north by dumping two feet of snow in one night, with high winds resulting in drifts as high as four feet. Over the next two weeks, another eight inches or so fell.
I was visiting relatives in Indiana, and got stuck there, as all planes were grounded for over a week. Schools were closed for about two weeks in most places-- with no warning, and no chance to hoard-- although, I guess in the 70s, people in the north, east and mid-west stocked up in late September on canned goods, flour, sugar, boxed mixes of stuff, extra soap, TP, etc., because you never know.
Newspaper and mail delivery stopped. It was about three days before the mail was back up. There was a moratorium on driving. Fire trucks and tow trucks were driving all the back roads looking for people stuck in the drifts.
There were deaths.
People died in car accidents from not pulling off the road as soon as they were warned to; homeless people died in droves; people died because their power or gas lines were knocked out, and they were without heat. Lots of vulnerable people died because they had emergencies, and ambulances couldn’t get through, or they had medical equipment at home that wouldn’t work because the power was out. Or the home health aides who checked on them couldn’t get through.
It was not on the world-scale that this was, and there was always light at the end of the tunnel, because, well, at some point spring would come; I’m just saying that in my lifetime, this is the closest thing I can think of that has happened.
My father was in Moscow when the coup happened and the Communist government fell, and he got stuck there for two weeks. He never talked about it much, but my impression was that while Moscow was in disarray, it didn’t shut down. It certainly didn’t have effects comparable to 9/11 outside of the USSR-- or even really Russia, from what I gather, but there was a lot of shutting down of services. My father had to live on credit cards, and it took my parents 8 or 9 months to pay them off.
New York shut down for 9/11, but really,* people* shut down. People shut down emotionally, so even in places very remote from New York that were completely unaffected, it was all emotional. It’s almost the opposite of what is happening now.
Katrina ruined parts of Louisiana, and it still has not fully recovered, but that was really localized; ditto the recent floods in Texas and Florida. Puerto Rico never recovered from the hurricane and it’s been years now; I wonder how they’re faring. They don’t really have places to isolate themselves.
I’m 53, and that’s what I know from my lifetime. This is the biggest outlier I’ve ever experienced. If my parents were still here, my father could talk about the Great Depression, and they could both talk about WWII. I don’t know what they’d say, except that their attitude would probably be much more stoic. People born in 1930 & 1940 were just like that.
I’m sure, though that children experience things much differently from adults-- the Blizzard was probably panicking adults who couldn’t get to work, and were living paycheck to paycheck. My aunt and uncle as well as my parents had salaries in addition to saving.
We, now, are wage-earners, and I don’t have the option of using vacation or sick time, while DH has a partial work-from-home option. However, we at least have savings, as scary as living off of capital is. We calculated that even if we didn’t have any money coming in, with the reduction in spending, in not eating out or using gas, but possibly with additional use of utilities (mostly electric), we have savings we can live off for 10 months. If DH’s check keeps coming in, we can live off of savings for several years. If I take a job doing something like Uber Eats, or stocking shelves at Kroger, and we tighten our belts, we would be OK for a long time.
The big difference is social mobility.
The Arab oil embargo of 1973-74 would be my choice, at least in terms of duration and repercussions. Although it wasn’t a “shutdown,” it was hugely disruptive. I remember waiting for hours in lines at gas stations in the summer heat. The price of gasoline skyrocketed at a time when cars generally got lousy mileage. There was odd/even gas rationing (commercial vehicles were exempt, and I heard of people putting magnetic signs on their cars to get around the rationing). Factory gas caps generally didn’t lock, and if you didn’t buy an aftermarket locking cap, your gas might be stolen by someone with a siphon hose. It went on for months, completely dominated the news, and it was pretty much all anybody talked about. The stress of wondering where your next tank of gas was coming from was omnipresent.
Nobody died, though (as far as I know).
Not even close. Nothing was actually shut down but commercial air travel, and only for a few days.
Otherwise, if you weren’t in the NYC area, it was life as usual, albeit surreal in a lot of ways.
The farm I used to live on had a little picket-fenced plot along the lane that contained the graves of four family members lost to the Spanish Flu. A mother and three of her children (the Spanish Flu hit young people the hardest.)
I’ve been thinking of those graves a bit lately. That’s probably the last time we faced a global pandemic this deadly, but back then the world wasn’t globalized so it didn’t have the kind of effects on global finance and supply chains this one is creating.
I’d say this pandemic is unprecedented. The world has never faced something quite like this before.
12/14/17
The end of net neutrality.
I recall nothing be shut down on 9-11. The library was open, my gym was open, the stores were open. At least where I was.
The pandemic almost certainly was made worse by the massive movement of mens across 4 continents to fight WW1.
The financial markets were shut and quite a few businesses in Columbus, Ohio. But that was just for a day or so and restaurants and bars were definitely open. There were some weird cancellations, I remember in particular some Halloween things being canceled, as if Osama bin Landen was interested in attacking some hay ride in central Ohio. I vaguely remember ‘less scary’ haunted houses that year.
Nothing like this
Air travel was shut down. But every business around the world didn’t shut down because of 9/11