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As
reported in my last post, in early July the UK Health Secretary, Andy
Burnham, publicly predicted that Britain could see 100,000 new cases of
swine flu PER DAY by September. Unless you monitor the UK
media, you weren’t going to see that startling figure. So far as I
know, the US media have virtually ignored it. The CDC sat on it,
too, until yesterday, Friday, Jul24.09, when CDC spokesman Tom Skinner
disclosed in an interview with
AP that the swine flu infection rate in the US was expected to reach 40%.
40%.
Ho hum. Big deal. According to media reports, H1N1 has been
characterized as fairly “mild,” as these things go. We keep
reading that the symptoms are mild and that the few fatalities that have
occurred have mostly been in individuals with “underlying” health
problems. But if you’re willing to do the numbers, that CDC
prediction of 40% infection rate is a pretty good reason to poop yourself.
Grab the TP and I’ll show you some of those numbers:
Two
other figures from the CDC are required to calculate expected total US
deaths in the next few months. As of Jul23.09 the total reported
cases in the US is 43,771. Total fatalities: 302. So the
reported fatality rate as per infections so far is 0.7%, which is actually
on the moderate to high side for past flu pandemics.
Based
on this fatality rate we can calculate the chance that a presently
non-infected person will die from H1N1. First calculate the total
expected cases in the US, which is 40% of 300 million total population
=> 120 million Americans will become infected. Of those, 0.7%
will die – that’s 840,000, which is 0.3% of the total population.
OK, not too bad, you’ve got 997 chances out of 1000 of surviving this
monster.
Doesn’t
sound too bad until you realize that 840,000 is over twice the number of
Americans killed in WWII, and about 1.5 times the combined number of
Americans and Confederates killed during the Civil War. Taking into
account the changes in population, that 0.3% is about the same figure as
your chances of dying in WWII as of 1941 (400,000 deaths out of a
population of about 131 million) and 10x higher than your chances of
getting killed in Vietnam as of 1965 (58,000 dead out of a
population of about 200 million).
Still
no big deal? After all, you were a 3 year old female in 1965 so your
chances of dying in Vietnam were really O%. How about some predicted
daily rates – hold on to your seats. I don’t know what a good
figure would be for the duration of this flu season, but according to
Google Flu Trends, flu seasons last about 6 months. 180 days.
Based on that estimate, the average new cases rate in the US will be
666,666 new cases PER DAY. The average death rate will be 4,667 PER
DAY, which is about 21 times higher than the average daily death rate of
American servicemen in WWII (~220/day) and about 1550 times higher than
the average daily death rate for American servicemen during the Vietnam
War (~3/day).
Note
that although these rates are extrapolated from the single 40% infection
rate the CDC put out yesterday, the calculated 666,666 daily infection
rate is in fair agreement with the UK figure, given that the population of
the UK is about 1/5 that of the US. Oddly, the UK figure for their
expected death rate of 40 per day is way low. Extrapolating from
these US figures, the UK should expect more than 200 deaths per day from
swine flu.
Even
if these estimates are waaaay off, this situation is still very serious,
and the US government is doing a piss poor job of warning the public about
what is coming. Basically, all we’ve had is an off-the-cuff
comment by a CDC spokesman during an interview with a news reporter.
Think about it: twice as many Americans could die between November and
April from swine flu than died in the whole 5 years of WWII. Hello?
Wolf? Chris? Katie? Barack? Anybody home???? There’s a
story here . . .
You
have to go to the UK media to get a sense of the seriousness of this mess.
For instance, the UK has warned its commercial sector to be prepared for a
20% illness rate for the duration of the flu season. Obviously,
everybody is not going to call in sick with swine flu the same week.
Over the next 6 months there will be a rolling disabled list in all
sectors. And because this virus is targeting the 15 - 44 year
old crowd, just keeping the country running is going to be problematic.
Look at the flight controllers. The FAA is having trouble as it is
keeping enough flight controllers at their screens. We’ve already
had one situation this year in which air space over North Carolina had to
be shut down so an over-worked flight controller could take a break.
What happens when 20% of all cops, firemen, air traffic controllers, truck
drivers, grocery store employees, utilities workers, teachers, and
military personnel call in sick over a 6 month period? Shouldn’t
the government start getting the public prepared for these possibilities?
The
health officials so far seem to be hanging all their hope on technology to
bend these numbers away from disaster. Tamiflu and vaccines, to be
specific. But the chances of Tamiflu containing this virus are nil.
There will be a large population of drug-resistant virus that the drug
won’t touch, and that fraction will expand rapidly. The more
Tamiflu you administer, the less effective it will be. As for the
vaccine, NPR
reported on July 20th that production of the H1N1 vaccine is not
going well — just at the point in time when we need it to be going very
well. Doris Bucher, of the NY Medical College, whose lab created the
pandemic virus seed strain from which vaccines are produced, told NPR that
manufacturers are getting very poor yields. Pass the TP, please.
The
meta-message from the silence we get from the CDC, your president, and
your government is that you’re going to have to look after yourselves.
Personally, I’m watching the Obama girls. If their daddy takes
them out of school and quietly moves them to safety in the next few weeks
– such as the post-flu season Southern Hemisphere – then we will know
the shoe is about to drop.
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