Just a gut instinct, but the difference might be due to life expectancy. In 1957/1968 compared to 2020, a lot less "old people" would be there and risk getting killed by a virus, thus the constraint on the economy was non existent?

From the comments:

First world societies today see sudden death as something that should not happen. You see it even in things like workplace accidents - fatal accidents are way down (order of magnitude) compared to where they were 50 years ago. The Afghan/Iraq wars resulted in a 10th of the American combat deaths that Vietnam did. Most dangerous diseases have been reduced to the point that people are worried more about complications from vaccines than disease itself (you see this in the US even around a COVID vaccine, although that is also tangled up in politics). Most people living today have not had to face something like this as an adult, and they lack any reference as to what the risks actually mean. All of this is what drives (at least in America) our obsession with safety, which is at is most extreme around kids (the changes in playground equipment and layout alone are a fascinating example).

In comparison, the worldwide death toll attributable to SARS CoV-2 was about 865,000 by the end of August 2020. Given the global population of about 7.8 billion, this translates to an interim pandemic mortality of about 11 deaths per 100,000 people. Even if the total number of deaths were to triple, the mortality rate would be comparable to that of the 1968 pandemic, and it would be about two-thirds of the 1957 rate.

The author compares statistics from the end of August to the historical record as if covid-19 was globally vanquished by September, and then assesses a 11/100,000 death rate (= 0.011%) based on those global statistics. The issue is that perhaps only 5% to 10% of the globe has been infected, which might be a generous estimate at the time of this posting (2020-10-17). If we thus extrapolate that 9 out of 10 people have yet to get infected, the death rate derived from the author's metrics should increase by a factor of ~10, so 0.1%.

Disregarding statistics before June 7th, the U.S. has managed to get the death rate down to around 27.2/100,000 (=0.027%). Good! Sounds like we learned some important medical lessons, but we're still limited by the interplay of hospital capacity with public behavior. Since we're taking pretty minor steps to increase hospital capacity, shaping public behavior becomes paramount. More on that later (spoiler: fuck Trump).

From wasO's article:

Why were things so different back then? Was it because we had no ­fear-reinforcing 24/7 cable news, no Twitter, and no incessant and instant case-and-death tickers on all our electronic screens? Or is it we ourselves who have changed, by valuing recurrent but infrequent risks differently?

First off, the CNN death counter running 24/7 in a corner of the screen is probably gonna be put into a future comedy sketch. That shit's ridiculous. We do not need 24-hour news coverage of statistics that show essentially no change in trends on the scale of 24 hours. It's clicksclicksclicksclicks and viewviewviewviewviewsssss, plain and simple. And we should all have a serious conversation(s) about the market incentives of most media to spread dis- and mis-information, stoke fear, propagate logical fallacies, etc., because holy shit, they exist. Hats off especially to Mark Fuckerburg.

Sidenote! That is actually one of the biggest problems of mine with pure libertarianism; Assurance that important information finds the consumers making important decisions related to that information, and in a timely fashion. The competition between government and business seems to generally provide the best guarantee that critical information will be outed quickest (10 billion citations required, I know, I know).

Anyway. A lot of us expected all of our US bureaucracy, taxation, legal code, and federally-funded expertise to properly handle covid-19, or any other pandemic. We don't really know what government could've done, because at almost every turn, the machinations of normal executive branch processes, including even a small respect for science, were undermined. I know there have been at least 10 documented instances of Trump & co. disregarding CDC/HHS recommendations so far. Maybe the best we can do is to agree on a null result; So far, the US covid-19 response is neither a test of big government or the lack thereof. I personally feel like it errs more towards the latter, but there is no agreed-upon criteria for judging this.

Overlying all of this is the fact that Trump himself has stoked a culture of ignorance and disregard for good public health practices because it has suited him politically. That's not how a leader leads. There is no excuse for this. The country would be much better off if Trump got out of the way of scientific recommendations. That said, is some of the MSM backlash coverage to Trump disregarding institutional advice intended (subconsciously or deliberately) to hurt Trump politically, at the expense of a more pure objectivity? Almost definitely, but it's always been like that, to some degree.

I want to subvert the entire business model and get grassroots. Still working on it.