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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

I sometimes like to ask provocatively "What would have happened had COVID happened 25 years ago?" (Don't sweat the exact timeline. I'm about right.) Yes, vaccines/medical issues but that's somewhat orthogonal.

I think the answer was that most office workers would have struggled to work. Yes, we could have mapped home phones to office numbers, bought people cell phones and paid for their plans, subsidized a second phone line, etc. But it would have been hard and difficult; most people would have been nowhere near prepared. I suspect at the end of the day, we'd mostly have made do for a month or three, said screw it, and reopened offices even if we knew more people would probably get sick. Oh, and forget things like grocery delivery or streaming TV (Netflix DVD barely existed) for the most part.

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We know what did happen 100 years ago with the Spanish Flu. People mostly had to keep going about their lives and millions got sick and died.

Oh, I agree. At one point I did try to research how much good the various (non medical) mitigations did 100 years ago but didn't come up with a lot of good information. Admittedly I'm not sure how much better our handle is on that today around COVID. But we'd have almost certainly done what we had to do even if significantly more people died as a result.

Sweden is the counter example to this, they mostly didn't shut down, just took precautions with the elderly and those who came in contact with them, and did not have excess deaths compared to their nordic neighbors who did lock down....

I think you're making my point to at least some degree. There were a lot of different policies and behaviors around the world and across large countries that seem to have not made the degree of difference as a general rule that people might have hypothesized depending on their priors.

In the case of Sweden, people will counter-argue that Swedes aren't overly social anyway and people did take precautions so the end result was sort of the same for all the hubbub. Is that true? Don't know.

It’s extremely hard to draw any conclusions from this. The Nordic cultural tendency to remain physically distant from strangers is so pervasive as to have been a meme long before COVID. You wouldn’t expect as strong a comparative effect between countries. Not to mention the general collectivist attitude which almost certainly yielded different baseline behaviors than, say, Florida’s culture did, regardless of top-down mandates.

In the UK people's behaviour changed significantly changed significantly before lockdown. The same in other countries - even places with very little concept of personal space (e.g. friends in Sri Lanka shared pictures of long, socially distancd, orderly queues).

> millions got sick and died

Estimated deaths Spanish flu - 25 to 50 million

Estimated deaths covid - 18 to 33 million

Not a huge difference, considering covid is known to be less lethal.

You're comparing absolute numbers. What about as a % of population?

World population is also up from ~1.8 to 7 billion which seems relevant for your comparison.

and bear in mind there was no supplemental oxygen in 1918.

Different diseases, different population sizes/densities, different world environment, different healthcare capabilities. I'm pretty sure there's no way to say with any confidence that had most people just been forced to get on with their lives, fatalities would have been X% worse (assuming an otherwise equivalent outbreak in 1997).

>> I think the answer was that most office workers would have struggled to work.

I worked at a large asset management company during Hurricane Sandy's arrival in NYC. Ocean water was dumped into lower manhattan and many buildings' elevators shorted out from the salt-water. Also, so many buildings had the same issue at the same time that we had a 3-mo queue for replacement parts. We didnt go to the office for 4 months.

No work was done. At the time, most of the staff didnt have VPN. Virtual jump boxes were tried but the latency was too low. Ultimately almost all staff except accounting/etc were "off"

Yes. Prior to 1995/1996 WFH would have been effectively impossible for 99% of office workers. From around then to around 2007 it would have still been fairly difficult for probably the majority of people. Since then, however, it became more and more feasible for more and more people every year. By the time Covid hit, the real question was why most office workers WEREN'T working remotely.

Entertaining to compare that 2007 mark (what I would have naively assumed) to the sibling comment talking about during Hurricane Sandy, which was ~5 years later and people still couldn't reasonably work from home. In many ways that was a lack of preparedness by IT departments, but to some degree it was also a lack of generally available and well developed services. Skype worked pretty well for phone calls in 2007, but it wasn't a MS product yet, so it would have been much more of an adventure to conference call a bunch of people for all hands meetings an the like.

I think by the time I joined my current company we were using Bluejeans but it wouldn't have been around in 2007 and not sure what was in place before. 2007 you'd presumably have mostly been using an audio conference solution and emailing files around.

So it would have been clunky but the enterprise software company I work for could have presumably made things work but with more friction. Certainly I was mostly working from the road or at home by then. I wouldn't have been out of commission for 4 months assuming working physical IT infrastructure.

WebEx was founded in 1995 and I recall using it at work long before Cisco acquired them in 2007. Even back in the late 1990s where I worked all managers were given a (voice) conference bridge number to use to set up conference calls. Outlook Web Access was first released in 1997. The first iPhone came out in 2007 and the first Android in 2008. WiFi was becoming fairly ubiquitous by 2003 and 3G by 2008. If people were unable to work from home during Sandy (late 2012) it was either due to an incompetent IT department or the fact that the hurricane knocked out power and internet.

Status quo bias is pretty huge--though I admittedly was mostly remote by 2007. I did go in more for a while when I switched jobs in 2010 but I've effectively been fully remote for years.

But to my basic point, most office workers wouldn't have been able to effectively work remotely most of the time until somewhere between the late 90s and the mid 2000s or so no matter how questionable going to an office would have been as a matter of health policy.

I think one thing missed by most comments is the night-shift.

Some people I knew that had to use tools that were not available at home did so "off-hours" so that there was a smaller cohort of people in a confined space at the same time.

I mean, a large fraction of people of course had to continue working in situ through the pandemic because it's physically impossible to do their job remotely. Office workers had the privilege of being able to go remote, but in these discussions it feels like people believe non-office jobs don't even exist and that the entire world just started working from home. 25 years ago everyone would have simply done the same as teachers and nurses and store clerks in fact did have to do.

It was far better going into an office with no traffic, being able to drive there rather than a crowded train and tube, having an office with maybe 90% of the normal occupants missing, and plenty of room for those of us who were in.

WFH is great for those who commute to an office, it’s quieter than working on a Sunday.

Oh, I agree. WFH would have been a blip that mostly didn't work very well for the relative handful of people not already able to do it. Everyone else would have been back in their offices pretty quickly.

> I sometimes like to ask provocatively "What would have happened had COVID happened 25 years ago?"

This is not nearly, to my mind, as interesting as the question "Was COVID the direct beneficiary of 21st-century technology?"

That is, would COVID have had the chance to spread intercontinentally without the benefit of affordable air travel which itself is the byproduct of workers enabled by cell phones, computers, and global economic trade?

Furthermore, had mRNA vaccines been available 25 years ago, many more millions of people exposed to the first virulent strains of COVID would have died.

The idea that workers would have been forced to RTO because WFH would not even be an option does not even rise to the level of fantasy, much less meaningful speculation.

Yes, there was more air travel than 25 years prior. Looks like a little under 2x. That's not nothing but's certainly not an order of magnitude.

And mRNA vaccines were presumably not going to be available 25 years ago.

So I don't see the evidence that, had COVID emerged from China in about 1996 (which it may not have done but see other related diseases), it would have had so much less impact. (And if that were really the case, we'd just have ignored it in the West and you'd still be working in an office.)

20 years ago most of us would be dead.

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