A respiratory virus emerges in China, crosses borders, becomes pandemic and kills several thousand in France in one month. Coronavirus in 2020? No, the Hong Kong flu in the late 1960s.
First pandemic of the contemporary era, this epidemic of influenza A (H3N2), spotted in mid-68 in the enclave of Hong Kong, circumnavigated the planet in a year and a half, killing a total of one million people including 50,000 in the United States and 31,000 in France.
“People arrived on a stretcher, in a catastrophic state. They died of pulmonary hemorrhage, cyanotic lips, all gray. There were all ages, 20, 30, 40 and over,” recalls the infectious disease specialist Pierre Dellamonica in 2005 in the daily newspaper Liberation. We crowded the dead “in the back rooms of hospitals and in the morgues” at the height of the epidemic in France in December 1969, explains to AFP the historian specialist in health matters, Patrice Bourdelais.
No headlines in the newspapers at the time, no government action or even a medical alert. “Phlegm and good words prevail over a possible mobilization”, notes Patrice Bourdelais who occupies at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS) the chair “Population, epidemic and health”.
At the peak of the epidemic in France, on December 18, newspapers mentioned an epidemic of “stationary” influenza (Le Figaro) or which “seems to be regressing” (Le Monde).
How to explain such placidity? At the time, the medical community, leaders, the media and the general population had an almost blind faith in progress and its new weapons, vaccines and antibiotics which work miracles, wiping out, for example, the scourge of tuberculosis, explains Patrice Bourdelais.
In addition, the sensitivity to death is not what we are today: “the 31,000 victims of the flu in Hong Kong have not created scandals, they have even gone unnoticed for several decades”, comments l ‘historian. It was not until 2003 and the work of epidemiologist Antoine Flahault that the death toll of this epidemic in France was drawn up.
It’s quite different with the covid-19
It was the era of the “Glorious Thirty”, the post-World War II economic boom. “On this multidimensional progress curve” an accident like a deadly flu is not as intolerable as it is today. International tensions with wars still present, in Vietnam, the humanitarian crisis of Biafra in Africa allow to put into perspective the misfortunes linked to an epidemic more deadly than another.
It is quite different today: the Covid-19 epidemic has driven out all other subjects and has led to gigantic paralysis.
Perhaps because health has become the primary individual concern and we were unconsciously convinced that our societies had all the weapons to fight epidemics, says Mr. Bourdelais.
For geographer Michel Lussault, the overwhelming importance assumed today by the Covid-19 pandemic simply reflects “the magnitude of the upheavals linked to globalization” with its extreme international mobility for goods, people and information.
Infectious disease specialist Philippe Sansonetti illustrates the international spread of the coronavirus in the northern hemisphere by showing a map of international flights from China to Europe and North America: the spread of the virus coincides perfectly with the density of air links.
“These emerging infectious diseases are diseases of the Anthropocene (epoch when the incidence of human activity on Earth becomes preponderant, editor’s note), exclusively linked to the handling of the planet by Man” explains t he as part of his chair “Microbiology and infectious diseases” at the College de France.
The Covid-19 pandemic tells us a story in three episodes: a “species jump” with the passage of a coronavirus from the bat to humans, then a “spillover” with the contagion of a man to other men, and finally a “third stage which is the explosion by the act of man on the planet, by intercontinental transport”, he indicates.
In 1968 and 1969, the influenza A (H3N2) virus had taken several months to pass from Asia, to the United States and to Europe. This time, a few weeks were enough.
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