Quote:
Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction
And yet there are people all over the country who know nobody who has it or had it. Why do you think your experience is the norm necessarily? Every flu season, if you looked hard enough, you could find teams, offices/workplaces, schools... whatever, that get decimated by the flu.
The same thing happened in Austrailia back in spring and summer when they had their flu season. The dire predictions ended up not surmounting to much of anything. The sad thing is, you can only cry wolf so many times before people start to not take it seriously... and one day, that could bite us in the ass big time.
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The numbers are very abnormal for this time of year though; normally we aren't even into flu season yet. In the US the number of people with H1N1 already exceeds what you'd expect to see at the peak of flu season, and Canada is heading that way too. The number of deaths this year may not be any higher than a normal flu season, mostly because many seniors seem to have some resistance to this variety and so far it has pretty much replaced other flu viruses circulating, but the number of people who get very sick is likely to be much higher (already approximately 1/3 of ICU spaces are taken up by people with H1N1). The only reason death rates aren't much higher is that the young people who are ending up in hospital or ICU from H1N1 have a better chance of surviving than the elderly that end up in hospital from other flu strains.
Even in Australia saying it didn't amount to much of anything isn't strictly true; the number of people who died wasn't any greater than normal, but their hospital system was strained to the limits by the number of sick people. I've also heard that, based on the timing and distribution of H1N1, epidemiologists expect it to be worst here than it was in the southern hemisphere.
Unfortunately responses to the pandemic appear to be mainly one extreme or another: media-driven panic or brushing it off as no big deal. IMO a response somewhere in between is more appropriate - the chance of getting H1N1 this season is very high (probably around 1 in 3) if you don't get vaccinated, and some otherwise healthy people are going to get extremely sick (probably not a lot, but I'd rather not play the odds on that). We're not in a Spanish Flu situation though - probably more like the 1958 or 1968 pandemics.