Swine Flu Mania

By BJ Bjornson

Outside of certain vice-presidents and much of the mainstream media, a lot of people are starting to put this whole "Swine Flu" thing into perspective.

If I were to say that this year 30,000 Americans would die from the flu, you’d probably think I was offering an alarmist take on the current swine flu outbreak. In fact, I would be offering an extremely optimistic take on influenza in 2009. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the country sees about 36,000 flu-related deaths in a normal year and around 200,000 hospitalizations. It’s standard for between five and twenty percent of the population to contract the flu in any given year.

Given all that, not only do we face the risk of an unusually bad pandemic of “swine flu” we also face a risk of panic. Apparently, very high levels of flu-related hospitalizations and deaths are actually pretty normal. But the media doesn’t normally cover them as national news stories. The heightened awareness of swine flu risks, however, means that anything flu-related is going to get dramatically inflated attention.

I think avoiding panic is one of the biggest concerns right now, and its nice to see most now using the WHO numbers for Mexico rather than the much larger "suspected" figures. As the above quote shows, even the suspected cases wouldn't count as a major surprise for an ordinary flu in a country of Mexico's population, but the way it is being treated by the media makes it sound far worse than it probably is.

Not that it hasn't kept certain people from taking advantage of the situation. Though I will have to disagree with John in that it would only be a gaffe if they didn't intend to say it. With this crew, the "kepp-the-dirty-brown-people-out" is unfortunately completely on-message, even if it is entirely ridiculous.

All that said, I'm forced to admit that this story had me shaking my head.

Three young Port Perry women who are Ontario's first confirmed cases of swine flu returned from Cancun on Friday with symptoms but spent the weekend at the local casino and visiting friends because their local hospital never advised them to stay home.

And even after 21-year-old Justine Stevenson was informed on Tuesday afternoon that she has the virus, no one has told her mom to close her home daycare business.

I can't wait until they just quarantine North America.

Comments

[jandrewmorrison]

What percentage of the population who contracts this particular strain of flu will be killed by it?

What percentage of the population who contract the "regular" flu will be killed by it?

I have received plenty of information on how scared I should be, but very little information on exactly what it is I should be scared of.

[BJ Bjornson]

I can't answer the questions off hand, but if you take the data from Yglesias' post, where between 5 and 20% of the population get the flu in any given year and there are 36,000 deaths, you wind up with a fatality rate of roughly 0.1%, For the swine flu, there simply isn't enough data yet, though indications are that it won't be that bad.

[conservativenorthwest.com]

Trend data so far was running about 6% for Mexico City (60 deaths per thousand), which is high for a seasonal epidemic but less than previous pandemics. Of more concern in Mexico was the high instance of mortality for 25-45 year olds-similar to the flu pandemic of 1918-1919.

With the flu vaccines here in the U.S. we shouldn't seen mortality numbers any higher than a normal flu season- but we will probably see more hospitalizations and much more work/school time missed.

My guesstimate is that if we do see a higher mortality rate, it will be in the migrant and working poor populations-those who can't afford to take time off work or can't afford to go to the doctor. They will put off getting required medical attention until it's too late.

Just wait until it's over. The "spin doctors" on both sides will be juggling to blame each other and to use the pandemic for their own purposes- The Right will say we should have closed the borders to prevent the spread of disease, and look how well our health care system fared against the socialized medicine countries. The Left will say a national health care system and better living wage would have resulted in lower loss of life.

...and the world will go on.

[BJ Bjornson]

What the actual rate in Mexico is might still be up for debate. This post at Effect Measure does a good job of explaining the difficulty of calculating the Case Fatality Ratio.

You likely have the spin right, but that's another place I wouldn't mind seeing some real data of how well the US health care system fared versus the socialized rest of the developed world, particularly since it usually doesn't fare all that well on such measures.

[Kat]

jandrewmorrison said: "I have received plenty of information on how scared I should be, but very little information on exactly what it is I should be scared of."

That's easy -- Be scared of you and/or your family contracting any illness without you having health insurance or enough cash-on-hand to cover decent medical care, including hospitalization.

Check the statistics behind those 36,000 that die of flu every year (on average), and you'll discover that a disproportionately high percentage of those who die are those who lack both health insurance and the means to pay for proper and timely healthcare.

Apparently, it's going to take a 1918-style pandemic to convince Congress that the needless loss of 36,000 citizens a year is as much of a national security problem as the needless loss of 3,000 lives on 9/11.