A few comments on pandemic influenza
fluidinfo.com
fluidinfo.com
But remember your mother's best advice : wash your hands and don't touch your face.
Despite the opening claim to being "fairly sober -- neither alarmist, nor dismissive", I thought the choice of emphasis here is somewhat in the alarmist direction, mostly making sure to mention how bad it could be. Examples:
I expect it will go global in the next couple of days, maximum.
The social breakdown in a pandemic is extraordinary.
No-one knows how bad another pandemic might be in terms of mortality... single digit millions... 100M might be possible.
...you should probably not believe anything any politician says about pandemic influenza.
So let me offer as a small counterweight the at-least-as-likely alternative scenario: flu deaths worldwide in 2009 will be about the same as previous years, around 40K in the US and up to 500K worldwide.
At this point: eat well, sleep well, and discourage sick people from coming to offices or socializing. Same as always.
http://www.puertorico-herald.org/issues/2003/vol7n30/KillerV...
"There were 3 waves of the 1918/19 pandemic. The first was in summer of 1918 - very unusual, as influenza normally falls to extremely low rates during summer. Note that the current outbreak is also highly unseasonal.
The 1918 pandemic killed with a very unusual age pattern. Instead of peaks in just the very young and the very old, there was a W shape, with a huge number of young and healthy people who would not normally die from influenza. There are various conjectures as to the cause of this. The current virus is also killing young and healthy adults."
In the first argument it isn't even clear why and if it's dangerous. Did the 1918 flu kill so many people because of something related to it being a summer outbreak, or would deaths have been even worse if it were a winter outbreak?
Those were just similarities just mentioned to make people think "Oh no! It's 1918 all over again!" without actually having to prove that it is. Pretty low debating tactic.
Sigh
Surely this sort totally false information and rumors has spread verbally before Twitter was around, now we just have a permanent record of stupid things people say.
- http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE53N228200...
The general feeling is that the reaction will almost certainly be an order of magnitude over the threat, given our knowledge and expertise with pandemics, and that most deaths will be from human response as opposed to the pandemic itself (as would be the case with a dirty nuclear bomb).
I'm not disagreeing, I just don't see any obvious ways that the human response would cause a lot of deaths - so I'm curious.
To be ultra conservative, assume there's a 0.1% chance that this becomes 10% as bad as the 1918 flu. The 1918 flu killed ~3% of the world population - if swine flu is one tenth as bad it means ~300K deaths in America. Therefore the expected number of (American) deaths is 300. As long as the vaccine is expected to cause less than a 300 deaths, we should do it, right?
But in the 1976 case: there was only 1 death from the feared strain... and 25+ deaths from the vaccination program, which was halted early. Overreaction can be out of proportion to the danger.
And there are all sorts of other harder-to-measure costs, including excess deaths, from overreaction. If a collapse of commerce driven by fear retards economic growth, more people die of other causes. If funds are diverted from other health interventions, more people die of other causes. Even in trying to vaccinate the whole nation: some small but nonzero number of people will die in the extra road travel to the vaccination sites.
Your 'ultra conservative' numbers are still way on the alarmist side, as far as I'm concerned. We may never have another natural pandemic even 1/10th as bad as the Spanish Flu. People are healthier; medicine and public health is far more advanced; the same WW1 disease-breeding-overcrowding is unlikely to recur; we have antibiotics (and many of the Spanish Flu deaths may have actually been from coincident bacterial infections).
There was a good article at The New Republic during the bird flu mini-panic that emphasized how unique the Spanish Flu was to its time. It appears to have disappeared from their archives, but fortunately I quoted it in its entirety to another forum at the time. See here:
http://www.xent.com/pipermail/fork/Week-of-Mon-20051003/0380...
TV news stations will of course hype this thing beyond all proportion, as they always do, but that doesn't mean the threat isn't real and that, as the article suggests, the death toll from Swine 'flu itself won't run into tens if not hundreds of millions.
Some will fall back to observe-hypothesize-test. Some will ignore/dismiss all observations unless someone in authority tells them to pay attention. Some will make the most outlandish claims. Some will make false statements, like the "don't eat swine" claim, just to add momentum to the story.
Of course there's no right answer in a situation that could be fast-moving yet requires immediate decisions based on incomplete information. It's just cool to watch all the different modes of thinking critically.
I hope this story turns out to be bogus -- I have a job where I deal with hundreds or thousands of people in small meeting rooms. But I've read up many years before today, and I understand that the pandemic IS coming. It's just a matter of time.
Just not this year, I hope.
Vaccines won’t be ready for months.