Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

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Oh, great. A disease panic, now accelerated by online social media and Twitter. This could be worse than the bird flu (panic) of 2004-2005!

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.

On top of that it suggested two similarities between the 1918 flu and the current swine flu, without explaining in much detail why it happened.

"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.

Frequently washing your hands, with soap and water, is better protection than eating and sleeping against such infections

And of course, try not to use "anti-bacterial" soap. It won't help against a virus, and if anything you are simply selecting for those strains of bacteria that have that extra edge.

the 1918 flu pandemic was worse than the black plague and it's not even airborne like this one.

http://www.puertorico-herald.org/issues/2003/vol7n30/KillerV...

Neither of your claims check out. The black plague killed a higher proportion of the world's population, and the 1918 Spanish Flu was airborne, like other flus.

There are properly more people living in Washington DC than in Europe during the time of the plague.

Not at all. According to Wikipedia, the population of Europe before the plague peaked at 70-100 million, while the plague killed 25-50 million, still leaving the population over 20 million, possibly over 50 million. The population of Washington DC is 592,000; if you include the metro area, 5.3 million.

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