The outbreak started in China, where it quickly engulfed the city of Wuhan before racing across the globe on commercial flights and ships, eventually killing more than 1 million people, over 100,000 of them in the U.S.

The novel virus triggered a state of emergency in New York City; caused so many deaths in Berlin that corpses were stored in subway tunnels; overwhelmed London’s hospitals; and in some areas of France left half of the workforce bedridden. Severely ill patients suffering from acute pneumonia were put on ventilators, often in vain. It was the late 1960s, and the Hong Kong flu was sweeping the world.

Coverage of the pandemic in The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 17, 1969.

That pandemic raged over three years, yet is largely forgotten today, a testament both to our resilience and to how societies are now approaching a similar crisis in a much different way.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, British Premier Boris Johnson and President Emmanuel Macron of France have described the coronavirus pandemic as their countries’ greatest challenge since World War II. Mr. Macron described it as a war.

But scientists and doctors say the Hong Kong flu is a more apt comparison. And because it happened in recent times—unlike the more devastating and better remembered Spanish Flu of 1918—it can offer lessons for today, though experts disagree on what these might be.

The second wave of the pandemic, covered in this Wall Street Journal article on Jan. 23, 1970, was deadlier than the first.

The Hong Kong influenza, caused by the H3N2 strain of the virus, came in two waves, the second far deadlier than the first. A vaccine was developed relatively quickly—researchers had learned from the other two 20th-century influenza pandemics, the Spanish Flu of 1918 and the Asian flu of 1957—but wasn’t widely available before the disease had reached its second peak in most countries.


Epidemiologists are now warning that this pattern could be repeated with the new coronavirus, with a second peak this winter when the world is unlikely to have a vaccine. But this time, governments and societies have responded far differently than they did in the late ’60s.

In 1969, the British postal and train services and French manufacturing suffered large disruptions from flu-induced absenteeism. In West Germany, garbage collectors had to bury the dead because of a lack of undertakers.

In affected countries, some schools had to close as teachers fell ill. In less than two years, over 30,000 people died in France and Britain, and up to 60,000 in both parts of divided Germany, according to recent estimates.

Doctors say the Hong Kong flu, named from being first identified in the then British colony, was less lethal than Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, but it appears to have spread in much the same way.

As the flu spread in the U.K. in December 1969, these London office workers wore masks—but didn’t adopt a six-feet-apart rule. Photo: Bettmann Archive

The 1968 pandemic started in Hong Kong and soon surfaced in the U.S. among American soldiers returning from Asia. A billboard that year in Des Moines, Iowa. Photo: Bettmann Archive

Yet governments and the media didn’t call for restrictions on public life and economic activity. The disease was allowed to run though communities virtually unhindered until a vaccine became available to stop it about four months after it surfaced.


This is in contrast to today’s official responses, which have largely focused on imposing a large degree of economic and social disruption to slow the spread of the virus and allow medical authorities to focus on isolating the most vulnerable and protecting individual lives. Strict confinement measures and wall-to-wall media coverage have made the new coronavirus a central presence in most people’s lives.

On Dec. 1, 2019, a patient in Wuhan, China, started showing symptoms of what doctors determined was a new coronavirus. Since then, the virus has spread across the world. Here’s how the virus grew to a global pandemic. Photo: Alberto Pizzoli/AFP

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In 1968-70, news outlets devoted cursory attention to the virus while training their lenses on other events such as the moon landing and the Vietnam War, and the cultural upheaval of the civil-rights movements, student protests and the sexual revolution.

Pierre Dellamonica, a French physician who started his medical career in 1969 as the epidemic was raging, says dead patients were piling up in his hospital in the south of France. But doctors and the public were fatalistic in accepting the death toll, he said.

Mortality rates for the 1968 pandemic were significantly lower than those of Covid-19, said Susan Craddock, professor at the Institute for Global Studies of the University of Minnesota. And without 24-hour news coverage, online resources and social media to heighten public anxiety, politicians were under less pressure to act than they are today, she said.

A New Jersey 6-year-old suffering from the Hong Kong flu in December 1968. Photo: Michael Rosenberg/Associated Press

undefinedThe German government played down the lethality of the Hong Kong Flu, welcoming that it seemed to only kill the elderly and the very young, said Malte Thiessen, a German historian specializing in pandemics.


“Today, medical progress has pushed up life expectancy,” Mr. Thiessen said. While this has heightened people’s sense of security, he said, it has reduced the public’s acceptance of disease and death, especially among the most vulnerable.

In the 1960s and ’70s, the carnage of World War II was a recent memory. Life expectancy was significantly lower than today and such diseases as polio, diphtheria, measles or tuberculosis were part of everyday life.

Many doctors and epidemiologists see today’s approach, with its focus on saving lives and shielding the most vulnerable, as progress. But some say it comes at a cost, and call for a more calibrated approach.

Johann Giesecke, a veteran epidemiologist who advises Sweden’s health-care authorities, said today’s lockdowns are counterproductive because mortality rates will rise again as soon as they are lifted, forcing renewed closures.


Sweden has taken an approach more akin to that used during the Hong Kong flu. Authorities haven’t ordered stores, restaurants or offices to close, letting the virus spread through the population. Today, Sweden has among the highest rates of Covid-19 deaths in the region as a percentage of population.

Prof. Yaneer Bar-Yam, a New York-based physicist who predicted the coronavirus pandemic after the outbreak in China, disagrees. Since developing a vaccine will take months—if it ever succeeds—curbing the death toll isn’t only a humanitarian imperative, but will also eventually prevent greater economic damage, he said.

The 1968 pandemic killed an estimated 1 million people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If anything, Mr. Bar-Yam said, the pandemic should have been a warning to today’s governments to be better prepared and ready to act much faster. Instead, he said, naive faith in technological progress let the crisis fade from memories.

The Black Death, the bubonic plague that ravaged populations in Europe in medieval times, has a bigger place in Western culture than more recent deadly pandemics, said Laura Spinney, author of “Pale Rider,” a book about the Spanish Flu.

That is a problem, she said, because “if you don’t remember the past, you can’t prepare for the future.”

Write to Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com