In general, the further back you go, the less practical it would be for most people to avoid going into an office if they wanted to remain employed and to avoid doing most of their shopping in-person.
Travel was also significantly less than what it is now. 20 years ago it would have been a local epidemic with limited spread. 10 years ago would have been a pandemic but still limited in terms of spread.
It would have slowed the initial spread, but as we have seen, it only takes a single "superspreader" event to infect an entire country. Out of the various actions taken to fight the pandemic, closing borders was among the least effective. Basically, it only worked on islands and in combination with strong local actions (testing, tracing, quarantine, lockdowns, ...).
20 years ago wasn't the middle ages, air travel was a thing (9/11 was almost 20 years ago). In fact, it wasn't that different than it is today.
The difference is in how the disinformation is propagated. In the past media companies would self censure idiotic or untrue ideas to protect their reputations and while you could find information if you looked hard, the things would tend to spread slowly. Social media doesn’t profit from reputation but from engagement, and untruth is more engaging.
I often wonder this and perhaps it would be less bad because people were less mobile (or it'd spread slower) - but worse because of the presumably worse treatment options.
Perhaps we today would be 20 years ahead in terms of medicine and tech given the real pressure for innovation that would have been needed ('war is the mother of invention' - or something), but for a higher cost in casualties back then.
So many variables! - It's an interesting thought experiment.
People weren't that much less mobile 20 years ago. And it would have been much harder for many businesses to go virtual relative to today, a lot of online delivery was early days and certainly not at today's scale, etc. So "shelter in place" would probably have been much more limited. 10 years earlier and most of the things that let people stay at home would have been off the table.
20 years ago my boss orders my to work from home the next day because it was important for me to finish a critical piece without the distractions of the office. Of course as a programmer we have always been on the bleeding edge of this just be the fact that until our tools work we can't make anyone else's work.
100 years ago people regularly ordered things for delivery. Sure it wasn't online, but all online gives you is some time.
We actually had a milkman for a period when I was growing up.
Certainly, as you go back in time, there was a lot of local delivery especially in urban areas. Mail order, Sears catalog notwithstanding, less so. Just to pick one random example, ordering music, movies, or books pre-Amazon was really pretty limited.
20 years ago, some people could work from home at least some of the time; I did personally (for pretty much the first time). There was fairly decent broadband availability, etc. But just barely. Go back just another 5 years and it gets much harder.
>but all online gives you is some time
And a lot more types of goods available. Again, 25 years ago, it would not have been practical for people to have wholesale pivoted a huge amount of shopping online. (And companies like B&H Photo couldn't have scaled.)
20 years is probably just about the cusp of it barely being possible.
Oh my. Today's polarized online discourse. All right, let me be more precise, since multiple people seem to be jumping to the conclusion that I'm some rabid anti-mask, anti-lockdown, science-hating, Trump-voting neoliberal. I was hoping to contribute fruitfully to the discussion in short form, but seems like I'll need more words.
The coronavirus pandemic is a terrible natural disaster. We are right to take extreme measures to control it until proper mitigating measures become available, and we are very lucky that it did not happen ten years ago. Our societal surplus thankfully allows us to do the right thing and protect our weak and unlucky, as well as be more precautionary regarding long-term effects than others would have.
Reiterating my point -- if we were unable to use modern science and technology to combat the pandemic, the death toll and long-term health effects would be comparable to a minor global war. This would be a catastrophe that would be remembered for generations. It still will, but thankfully writ small.
Compared to other historical catastrophes -- the Black Death, the World Wars, five centuries of European warfare, Mao's Great Leap Forward, it would be a mild event, mostly because the death toll would hit the elderly and the weakened hardest. It would be bad, but it would not mean sacrificing a whole generation of our most ambitious young and capable people. It would certainly not be a catastrophe that threatened societies, although political follow-on effects would have lasting impact.
It's also worth noting that many authorities around the world have bungled the response terribly, both being ineffective in their measures and causing more economic damage than necessary. But that's dangerous territory to discuss, since you risk being branded and shut down with the terms I mentioned above.
(For reference, I made a fool of myself in my social circle in early March by suggesting 'extreme' quarantine measures before any Western governments did. I've been supportive of most science-based measures to slow and contain the pandemic, while at the same time being critical of many authorities' slow adaption of the best available science -- including lack of early mask recommendations and reluctance to consider aerosol contagion).
I think it wouldn't have been as big of a deal. Most people had their minds made up about severity in early 2020 after seeing Wuhan and Italy. No amount of new data pointing to the fact that _those_ were in fact the outliers, and that COVID-19 is bad-but-not-apocalyptic will change their mind. I attribute this to the speed at which information travels now, and the way that social media works to reenforce existing beliefs rather than encouraging a constant reassessment.
Even ten years ago WFH and online school just would not have worked, this was when the iPhone 4 was hot new tech and most people still had single digit mbps internet. There's no chance that you could try the sort of 'online everything' we've been doing this year. The lockdowns become far less palatable when the consequence is clearly "no school or work for a long time".
Newspapers were still pretty good at spreading nationwide narratives and fear back then, probably much better than current media because people couldn't talk back at scale.
Without social media and news organizations forced to whore themselves for clickbait money it would have been just written off as "damn those two pneumonia seasons were really shitty" .
This is pretty typical. The big companies tend to invest in the little ones so that if the little one finds something good they can buy it and put the rigor of large scale manufacturing (and marketing of course) around it. If the little ones fail to find anything they can cut their losses without having the moral hit of laying people off.
For now: Pfizer has already got what they want: a license to produce a useful vaccine. Conversely BioNTech also got what they need: someone able to run a large trail and scale up manufacturing while giving them some profit.
In a few years both companies will re-evaluate their relationship. Partnerships can last for years at times. Other times one company is bought. Other times they go their own ways. All are normal and mean nothing, though if you are an investor each has different implications.
BNTX's market cap is pretty large already, it's unclear how desirable a buyout would be by a Pfizer-type company. It seems better to split profits / contracts.
