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A Different View on H1N1 Swine Flu

There are two groups in the h1n1 swine flu issue.  Group A is panicking, flooding the ER’s, thinking they have the swine flu, fearing death, or avoiding all human contact.  Group B says the media is overhyping this, they are citing the 50M killed in 1918 compared to the 200 killed in 2009 by h1n1, they are ridiculing people who wear masks in public or on airplanes (plenty of evidence of this on twitter), and otherwise dismissing this virus as a joke, a non-event.

Neither Group A (the panickers) or Group B (the naysayers, the denialsists) is right.  Here’s why:

-A(H1N1) Swine Flu has killed 20 people, sickened 900 in 18 countries, and is being transmitted human to human.  For the first time ever, the World Health Organization raised their pandemic alert to 5 of 6 last week.  This has the potential to become a widespread pandemic, unlike bird flu, unlike SARS.  This isn’t like anything else most people alive today have experienced before.

-Even though there have been 900 confirmed cases worldwide, there are most certainly many more people who have a mild or moderate illness and that haven’t gone to a doctor or hospital so the number is definitely not 900.

-This thing went global 1 week ago, yet people are already calling the end game score.  Can you call a football game after 4 plays?  No.  The 1918 flu took 2 years to finish doing its damage of 50M deaths, not 1 week.  Experts say it is still far too early to draw any conclusions about how bad (or not) this virus will be and no conclusions should be drawn after 1 week.

-Some people are already in poor health, or have underlying disease like asthma or other respiratory issues, or they may be pregnant, very young, or very old, or they might be cancer patients on chemo with weakened immune systems.  To them, this is a very big deal to have a new highly contagious virus out there, whether it’s worse than the flu or not, so those people might be the ones out there wearing masks and very rightly so.  To them, this could mean pneumonia, bronchitis, trouble breathing, and weeks of illness, not just a couple days in bed.  Next time you think about laughing at or mocking someone wearing a mask and labeling them as a hypochondriac or a paranoid crazy, think about this.  Personally, I appreciate people who wear masks — if they happen to be infected, it’s less likely that the’ll cough or sneeze on me.

I’m really annoyed by these people who seem to take nothing seriously and just want to mock and judge others:

mathowie: Oh paranoid man wearing the surgical mask on our cross-countryflight, I’ll miss you most of all…

1 day ago from Birdhouse · Reply · View Tweet

koreyb: Only one swine flu mask on my flight home. Lol. No one wanted to sit next to him.

about 3 hours ago from TwitterBerry · Reply · View Tweet

 And then there’s the opposite view:

tonymaro: One passenger on the flight wore a mask. Is he the smart one?

about 9 hours ago from TwitterBerry · Reply · View Tweet

-There are 300,000,000 people in this country.  226 cases of h1n1 in the U.S. as of today is not many.  Therefore, the odds that you’ll be infected if you take a flight or hang out around other people today are low.  That said, viruses spread exponentially and take months to reach their peak spread.  If the infection continues to spread, you’re more and more likely to be infected by someone as more and more people get the virus.  If you have mild sniffles and go to the ER, you’re overtaxing our already overburdened medical system and exposing yourself to other infectious disesase.  But if you have any underlying risk factors or other disease, and you have a fever/cough/etc then you should definitely call your doctor.

-The media overhypes everything.  That isn’t new.  The media performs a valuable service to us: alerting us to important issues.  The media’s volume shouldn’t sway our opinion. We must investigate, research, look to experts, and make our own decisions.  Just because  media speaks loudly about an issue, we can’t then assume that that issue must be BS.  Some threats that the media alerts us about are actually threats.  Not all hyped threats are harmless.

The bottom line is that we shouldn’t be panicking about this but at the same time we shouldn’t be calling the results of this possible pandemic after 1 week.  Neither is correct.  To all armchair medical experts: keep your conclusions to yourself, please, and restrict yourself to spreading facts from mainstream experts rather than spreading misinformation and your own hype.  We should all become part of the solution to slow the spread of the disease: extra gel/handwashing, if you’re sick STAY HOME, wear an N95 mask if getting sick would be very bad for you (the CDC actually recommends masks in areas where transmission of A(H1N1) has been confirmed).

Everyone has to decide on their own how to handle this, based on their own tolerance for risk, their own assessment of the risk, and their own personal situation.

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Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 12:39 am and is filed under Web Business. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.