Well if the most susceptible people got the vaccines first they wouldn’t get it and the other people may have gotten it but fought it off and only saw a very mild form of the flu.
Things like this are usually only effectively analyzed in hindsight
I don’t understand where you are getting your figures. According to the CDC we are well above the seasonal baseline. Are you comparing the total for the first month of the flu season to deaths through an entire flu season? Every figure I can find suggests we are way over normal mortality.
I see the problem from your link. Yes, from what I understand the swine flu is generally a weaker influenza. The problem isn’t that this influenza is stronger than others, the problem is the complete lack of immunity which causes it to spread to a lot more people. Maybe only 1 out of 2000 people die from this flu, but if considerably more people catch it, then you get a higher mortality. What is particularly concerning is the demographic that this flu tends to hit hard.
Funny thing Gonz, unlike you I don’t think that all conservatives or all libruls think alike on this. In fact I don’t think it is a political or partisan issue. As far as conspiricy nuts go, well they are pretty well distributed across the political spectrum.
Once again, the death rate can only be understood in context of age groups. If you are over 65 then H1N1 is a very non-issue thing. If you are 65 or oveer your chance of catching and dieing from seasonal influenza is much much much greater than your chance of catching and dieing of pandemic A/H1N1. And that group is the lion’s share of seasonal flu deaths each year. OTOH if you are younger then H1N1 is much more of a risk. For those under 18 H1N1 has already killed 3X as many as normally die in a complete flu season (using apples to apples metrics). And the hospitalization rate has also been significantly to severalfold higher than complete flu seasons for all age groups other than those over 65; the 5-17yos over 10x as high.
Now if one presumes that we got this instead of the usual Jan to March seasonal season, and that nothing else happens from here, then maybe its worth it. The elderly are not intrinsically worth less than are the young. That presumption however may be premature.
5 - or could it be the placebo effect, and it’s a normal flu but people believe it is somehow worse and some/many have worse symptoms.
or dare I add #6
6 - That #5 is true and the media is spreading terror, a form of domestic terrorism.
Speak for yourself. Many of us find it as worrisome as liberals do.
Unjustified fear of H1N1 flu is making a fortune for Roche Pharmaceuticals? Those concerned about H1N1 are, by and large, making sure they get vaccinated. Preventing H1N1 through vaccination would tend to drive down Tamiflu sales, hurting Roche (which does not make flu vaccine).
And while Roche has ramped up manufacture of Tamiflu (a drug that treats and may prevent influenza in exposed persons) to meet demand, if both seasonal and H1N1 flu cases are significantly lower than expected then Roche’s profits will take a hit. This phenomenon has a parallel in vaccine manufacture - in years where flu is less severe than forecast, vaccine makers are stuck with excess product that has to be discarded. This is a reason (along with liability issues due to overblown and false vaccine fears, and stringent government regulation) that the number of vaccine manufacturers has dropped markedly in recent decades (there are currently only two makers of flu vaccine in the United States).
With an estimated 4,000 or so dead from H1N1 in the U.S., that’s a hell of a placebo effect.
This is a good way to explain the increased pediatric mortality. Death is often a symptom of the patient merely thinking they have died. What we really need, is a double blind study to prove that these patients have in fact died.
And speaking as a liberal, I think that basic precautions like frequent hand-washing seem to be pretty effective against it, and that there’s therefore no cause for panic.
Hand-washing is good. It needs to be employed more rigorously, notably in hospitals to prevent infections. And the next time you need surgery will you tell the operating room staff to just wash their hands, and the heck with the standard antibiotic protocol, because there’s no need to panic about the possibility of post-operative infection?
Washing my hands regularly and avoiding crowds are two things I do to help avoid colds and flu. I’ve also gotten vaccinated against H1N1 (and seasonal flu) because immunization cuts my odds of getting influenza substantially.
I don’t regard that as “panic”, but as common sense.
There may have been some panic, but it certainly wasn’t part of the CDC action plan. I Don’t consider being well informed about a new virus to be hysterical. People needed to change their routines slightly. People needed to be encouraged to get their vaccine. The advice never went beyond that.
I would not tell the OR staff that, because having surgery is inherently more risky, from an infection perspective and otherwise, than just being in the same room with other people. Nor is hand-washing the only basic precaution that should be taken-- There’s also staying home from school or work when sick, and vaccinations for high-risk groups, and so on. I don’t think any of that constitutes “panic”. Taking such massive doses of colloidal silver that your skin turns permanently blue, say, that’s panic.
The statistic we never get is how many people got the current epidemic infection, and never went to the doctor. They had symptoms, maybe even took a day off work for a “cold” and then got better. How many times did I get the flu in the last five decades? I have no idea. What type? No one has a clue. I have been very healthy, but I do get “colds” some years, some years not. If you ask me if I know that colds are not the flu, I will tell you that other than with a microscope, or testing kit, you don’t know which is which.
The statistics we do get show that infection patterns, and susceptibility patterns are not typical this year, nor is the frequency over time. If it had been as virulent as it was first reported, with three of five hospitalized patients dying, we would not be hearing the buzz about “conservatives aren’t buying it.” They would be buying and stockpiling it.
To me it seems most likely that several factors happened. Folks who were alive in the fifties had a residual immunity to the h1n1 strain. Vaccination of high risk groups was more successful than it is getting credit for. Healthy practices and prophylactics have also reduced the infection rate, and the synergy of all those reductions limits the spread even more. Particularly, health and school systems have been practicing hygiene more scrupulously for the last eight or nine months than ever before. That too limits the spread.
This is not what an unsuccessful epidemiological campaign looks like. It is exactly what a successful campaign looks like.
Tris
Was it really first reported this way? I remember a whole lot of “we don’t know” in April, but by July they were saying typical infection was quite mild for the flu.
That’s how I remember it anyway.
It was supposed to be very virulent. It has been pretty much a miss. The fear was that it would mutate into something worse when it came back. it did not.
If virulent is defined by contagious, then it is not even remotely a miss. Sickness was off the charts very early in the season, and flu was being reported throughout the summer. It is very unusual for flu to be reported in the summer. If virulent is defined by the severity of disease, then I never heard those reports. The people dieing and coming down with severe symptoms, were always the exception. A notable exception, particularly from the demographic, but it has always been stated that this was a pretty mild virus.
The fear should always be that a new flu virus mutates, but a fear that something might happen is not a prediction that it will.
gonzo’s definition of “a miss” differs from that of many people.
Do you just make stuff up? Or are you really only informed by the Extreme Right Wing media outlets?
It was very quickly made clear that the initial scarier numbers out of Mexico were a reflection of many of those less ill not seeking health care. From that point on the messaging from the experts was that we have no idea how virulent this may or may not turn out to be. If anything they jumped on the messaging that it is not so virulent ahead of the data and are messaging that to this day more than the data indicates.
The fear was and remains that it may mutate or recombine into something worse. So far (despite some hysteria in some parts of the 'nets about the D225G mutation) it has not. The risk that it will is still real and the riskiest point for that to occur is just coming up now and over the next several months as it spreads more through China, Thailand, Indonesia, and the MidEast (areas with endemic H5N1 aka Asian Avian). No one knows how big that catastrophic risk is but it is clearly nonzero.
The actions taken by the WHO and the CDC have had the aim of reducing that (presumably already small) risk while also reducing the real morbidity and mortality associated with the bug in its current form as well. A tough task only made harder by the messy state of public health in many parts of the world, the overlay of political posturing, and media which can only message extremes but can message mutually contradictory irrational extremes within the same breath. They’ve done a fair job, not great, but fair. A thankless task of course because if they do it right the danger never materializes and various doofuses claim that therefore the risk never existed. And if the bug does end up much worse, then they are beat up for not having done enough.
I hope that we can reach next summer and say it was a miss but saying it now is very premature.
For most people, the flu is an entirely different experience than any kind of “cold.” Having had it once (which is one time too many) and from others’ accounts, a genuine influenza has you feeling like death for several days. On the first day you think you’re going to die. For the next three days you’re afraid you won’t.
But I agree with the rest of what you said.
The vast masses are impossible to please. If the flu spreads widely and kills huge numbers the establishment will be blamed for not doing enough. If it seems to fizzle and not go anywhere the establishment will be blamed for overreacting.
I have previously touted the book The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history for a nice description of what happens when the powers that be deny there is a problem and fail to take appropriate action.
They did not deny the problem. They went crazy trying to avoid it. Way overboard. It was a big thud. But that is a good thing.
The CDC quit testing because very few cases were h1n1.