‘Talk about first world problems’: What would the pandemic have been like in 2005?

Oh God. No Netflix. That was my first thought when my editor suggested I embark on a thought experiment: what would it have been like had a certain nasty little ball of proteins and RNA jumped the species barrier and spread like wildfire among the world’s human population 15 years ago.

I then felt horribly guilty. We’re in the middle of a global crisis created by a virus that’s killing people daily, a tragedy exacerbated by the fumbling efforts of politicians to control it and a toxic disinformation machine that is still – still – trying to write it off as no worse than a nasty flu. And yet my first thought when asked to play the game of “what if” was to zero in on Netflix. Talk about first-world problems.

I could say it was because Netflix came into its own when I was suffering what doctors like to refer to as a “moderate” case of Covid, which knocked me flat and left me gasping for breath while my ailing wife was in an even worse state.

She would probably have spent time in hospital had we not been hit in March when coronavirus wards were full to bursting and you had to be in a very, very bad way for NHS 111 to take an interest. My wife came close. On the worst day for both of us, the GP we had scheduled a phone appointment with was so concerned he called back twice.

I couldn’t now say what we watched on Netflix through that period because we didn’t really watch it. We just had it on as a comfort blanket while our nine-year-old daughter did a remarkable job of playing nurse.

But, thinking about it, my “oh God, no Netflix” reaction wasn’t about Netflix and its role as a technological teddy bear at all. It was a metaphor. What I really meant by that statement was: how would we have managed given where the technology was back then.

Tech has played a vital role through the course of the ongoing crisis. Over the past 15 years it has advanced by leaps and bounds. Connectivity has boomed. So has the digital economy. Its titans have exploded and now vie with each other for the title of “world’s biggest company”.  

Facebook is a decidedly mixed blessing, a constant source of controversy and debate, an important conduit for the pernicious disinformation I mentioned. But it also helped to keep my family fed while we were quarantined and couldn’t secure an online order.

When I posted about our condition a friend and former colleague who lives nearby picked up shopping for us (which included a chocolate cake for the kids). Another arranged a pizza delivery when my wife was isolating in the house and I was incubating the virus,  in a permanent state of mild panic.

The social media revolution had barely started 15 years ago. Facebook was just getting going. Twitter was a year away. The biggest noise in the industry’s early phase was MySpace. Remember them? Few do.

Online shopping was further on, but still at a much earlier stage of its development. Amazon,  which had been around for several years, was steadily expanding its service beyond books. eBay was also active.

Tesco’s 2006 annual report (which mostly covers 2005 because the grocer’s financial year ends in February) showed it was taking 200,000 online orders a week, accounting for 3 per cent of UK sales. The company is now handling 1.5m and they deliver 16 per cent of the group’s sales.

Ocado was delivering but it was very small. Researcher Kantar’s figures say it didn’t reach a market share of 0.2 per cent until 2007. Over the course of the pandemic it has added that amount to its tally, its share rising to 1.7 per cent from 1.5. Market wide, online accounted for £9.2bn of sales for the year ending 3 November 2019 compared to £13.8bn for the year ending 1 November 2020.

The majority of sales are still in store, and will continue to be so. But that’s still a boom and a half, necessitating a rapid increase in capacity. It’s a remarkable achievement in logistics, one that simply wouldn’t have been possible 15 years ago.  

My point about “what no Netflix” as a metaphor for our reliance on tech and connectivity goes beyond the struggles people like us may have faced keeping fed. It has played a major role in facilitating the working-from-home revolution made necessary by the virus.

Another company that simply didn’t exist 15 years ago: Zoom. It and its peers have become the virtual venues for countless business meetings. Over the past six months I have chaired a conference session discussing tech and disability, reviewed the morning papers for the BBC, learned how to use a new editorial system, attended an Independent “town hall” with our bosses, participated in a virtual parents meeting with our daughter’s teacher (it went well), met up with contacts, and said good luck and farewell to colleagues at a leaving do all over Zoom.

It has facilitated everything from sittings of the House of Commons, including prime minister’s questions, to the NFL draft, to Kermode and Mayo’s film review show on Radio Five.

Fifteen years ago, YouTube had only just been founded. One of the first viral videos featured former Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer going crazy on stage at a company event. Downloading took patience. The connectivity then isn’t what it is today.

I spoke to Neil McCrae, BT’s chief architect on that subject. An avuncular Scot, with an impressive collection of old pinball machines (the meeting was via MS Teams rather than Zoom), he said Britain in 2005 was at the dawn of a connectivity revolution.

Download speeds of 40 megabits per second aren’t uncommon today. Back then, only about 10m people had broadband of which half lived with download speeds of less than 2mb and half were at about 2mb. There was no iPhone; and data downloads over the top-end handsets that were available were slow and expensive.

So no Joe Wicks to keep the kids fit either.

Humans are adaptable. As a result of a serious road accident that robbed me of my mobility, I started working from home a decade ago when connectivity was better than in 2005 but nowhere near as good as it is now. YouTube was a thing, Zoom, Microsoft Teams were not. But the adaptations we have made today still wouldn’t have been possible in 2010, let alone 2005.  

Firms’ ability to adapt their businesses to the pandemic, for example, by converting restaurants to takeaway outlets would have been greatly impeded. Who would have delivered them? Back in 2005 there was no Uber and no Deliveroo.

Google Maps, used by 1bn people daily, had only just launched. It wasn’t all that uncommon to see pizza delivery personnel checking their A to Z if they were unfamiliar with a new customer’s address.

The pandemic may have been with us for longer too. Medical technology has progressed such that we now have a workable vaccine. The holy grail of producing and getting approval for a vaccine and sticking it into people’s arms would likely have taken a lot longer.

Politically, it’s fair to assume that Gordon Brown, the then Chancellor, would have done what was necessary, and spent what was necessary, to support the economy while the work to suppress the virus was underway. He might very well have done more to help the poorest in society given Labour’s priorities.

Back in 2005, base rates were reduced by a quarter point to 4.5 per cent in August. They were quite low by historic standards but positively stratospheric by today’s. Borrowing would therefore have been a lot more expensive for Brown than it is for Rishi Sunak. But rates would have had to fall fast in response to a killer virus triggering an economic crisis.

The UK appeared to be more economically stable than it is today, and much faster growing. It expanded by 2.4 per cent in 2004, accelerating to 3.2 per cent in 2005, although our imaginary pandemic would have put paid to that. And it did not have the carbuncle of Brexit hanging over it, which has already robbed Britain of billions of pounds worth of investment with much worse on the way. These are the wages of the extremism of Boris Johnson’s government.

On the other hand, 2005 was only two years before the start of the credit crunch that would lead to the financial crisis. Sweeping regulatory reforms followed in the wake of it, with banks forced to hold far greater reserves. Tighter controls on their lending were imposed, annual stress tests designed to gauge how they would cope with an economic shock were demanded. The “light touch” regulation that the UK used to boast about was scrapped in favour of a much more interventionist approach.

To date, the public health and economic crises wrought by Covid-19 have not been accompanied by a banking crisis. Would that have been true in 2005? Are you shuddering now? I am.

At least the UK’s public services were in better shape. Labour had been investing heavily in them. Today, some of them are at breaking point, having been hollowed out as a result of the Conservatives’ brutal decade of austerity. The problem is arguably at its most acute in local government but the latter is far from alone.

How would other parts of the Blair government have coped? Prime ministers always prize loyalty and like to promote from within their own faction. But Labour ministers weren’t selected for their slavish adherence to the leader to the degree that they are by Johnson today. It’s hard to imagine Blair allowing someone like the hapless Education Secretary Gavin Williamson to remain in post for as long as he has.

But we should beware of looking back through rose-tinted spectacles. All was not sweetness and light in the NHS, for example. Government reforms had led to job losses and angered unions. John Reid had held the post of Health Secretary prior to the 2005 election. He was succeeded by Patricia Hewitt after Blair was returned for his third term in the General Election of 2005, with a sharply reduced, but still comfortable, majority.

Would that election, four years into the government’s term of office, have even  been held? Blair could have held on until 2006. This, remember, was before the Fixed Term Parliaments Act brought in by the Tory/ Liberal Democrat coalition led by David Cameron, a piece of legislation that Johnson had to work around to hold the 2019 General Election and would dearly like to get shot of.

One of his government’s more sensible decisions was to postpone this year’s scheduled local elections. Had our 2005 pandemic followed the same sort of timetable, the same would likely have been true of that year’s General Election. Reid would therefore likely have stayed in post. Bruiser he may have been, but looking at Matt Hancock’s performance today, which would you prefer?

Over in the US, George W Bush was in the White House. He is not remembered fondly overseas, principally because of the Iraq war,  which also casts a dark cloud over Blair’s legacy. Bush would stand no chance of winning so much as a primary in today’s Republican Party. How would he have handled a pandemic? It’s hard to imagine him getting involved in the sort of denialism, laced with conspiracy theory and a dash of anti-Chinese racism, that the Trump administration has fostered. Economically the US, like the UK, was in fair health, with GDP growing at 3.8 per cent in 2004, 3.5 per cent in 2005.

Bush’s record when confronted with domestic crises is mixed, with perhaps the biggest black mark being the handling of Hurricane Katrina, when the levees that kept the waters from consuming New Orleans broke and many of the Big Easy’s residents, particularly those who were poor and black, were left in dire straits. But Trump’s performance when faced with events like that has scarcely been any better. Just ask Puerto Rico. Would Bush, would any president in the last century have done a worse job managing the pandemic than Trump? It’s doubtful.

But Trump’s performance when faced with events like that has scarcely been any better. Just ask Puerto Rico. Would Bush, would any president in the last century have done a worse job managing the pandemic than Trump? It’s doubtful.

The Spanish Flu of 1918, another virus that was far worse than a normal flu, and certainly far worse than the “swine ‘flu” pandemic of 2009/2010, created quite a scare but ultimately turned out to be less serious than had been feared.

The British Film Institute had a silent, captioned, public information film concerning the flu that would have been shown in cinemas. It features a lecture on virology from Dr Wise and the dramatised experience of “Brown”, who unwisely heads off to work despite his coughs and sneezes (watch it on the BFI player for free here).

“A person like Brown suffering from any kind of cold or fever should stay at home for a few days until all symptoms have abated,” Dr Wise says.

When the caption appears you can hear, in your mind’s ear, the clipped didactic Queen’s English that would likely have featured were it a “talkie”. The dramatic portion of the film does not end well for “Brown”. His fate is not a happy one.  But the factual part, the public advice from Dr Wise, was sound then, would have been sound in 2005, is still sound today.

We would have coped had the pandemic roared in 15 years ago, and it easily could have. The environmental destruction that contributed to the current one was under way, habitats were being destroyed, the same cavalier approach to our planet and its other inhabitants was apparent.

Looking back to how we might have managed makes for an interesting thought experiment. But it’s just as important to look to the future and how best to prevent a future outbreak by taking better care of our environment. If we fail to do that we might be looking back to how we coped in 2020 in just 15 years time, or maybe sooner.