The Pandemic Epidemic
I’m getting pretty sick of this swine flu.
It’s not that I don’t believe this new strain of flu bug has the ability to make a lot of people sick. It’s just that we have shown once again we are about to lose our ever loving minds over something that is, at best, a minor blip on the importance scale.
President Obama is being lauded as on top of this problem having announced a set aside of $1.5 billion to fight this flu pandemic. One question that was not asked that seems like it might be kind of important to me is, on what?
In one breath we are being told that millions of doses of anti-flu vaccines have been sent across the country. In the next breath we are told that this is a new strain of flu and that there is no vaccine in place to combat it. We are also told that the creation of a flu specific vaccine for this strain is very challenging and time consuming. So if we don’t have the right medicine to fight this new type of flu what type of flu vaccine are we blanketing the country with? Perhaps we are sending last year’s bird flu pandemic vaccine. There should be plenty of that left on the shelves seeing as that pandemic was as big a dud as the last 5 or 6 pandemics that were forecasted to wipe out half of the population. I wonder if the CDC is able to get a discount for buying last year’s model.
The fact is that, while tragic, so far we have only one confirmed death of a 2 year old child from this new strain of swine flu. To put this into a bit clearer perspective we normally have about 5 children per year die from drowning in the toilet. We have 226 confirmed cases of this flu in this country of 306 million, and that is only because we are looking for it. If we had 5000 deaths from this new strain of flu it would not even make a statistical blip in the averages.
On average there are over 20,000 deaths in this country every year from the flu and twice as many as that from pneumonia. As was the case of the single swine flu death, they are mostly children ages 1 to 4, those over 65 and those whose health is already compromised. One statistic that is not tracked is how many of those people would have likely died from some other disease had they not caught the flu.
The CDC is claiming that the spread of this strain is no different than the spread of a normal winter flu. If the CDC had actually bothered to do the math they would have seen that this flu pandemic is actually spreading far slower than the normal winter flu. The CDC is also advising that if there is a confirmed case of the H1N1 flu strain in a schoolchild, that school should shut down for 2 weeks. Currently there are 476 schools closed due to this warning. How 476 schools can close with only 226 total confirmed cases shows we may be overreacting more than a little bit.
The president is advising Americans to wash their hands, which is pretty much the same advice I got from my grandmother. Only the president isn’t going to yell at me in Czech if I don’t do it. I can only assume that part of the $1.5 billion being spent on the pandemic will go toward hand washing public service announcements produced in every language short of Martian, proper hand washing classes conducted round the clock by ACORN volunteers, an artist’s rendering of George Washington washing and possibly even a good old fashioned Uncle Sam poster saying “I Want You…To Wash Your Hands.”
The vice-president on the other washed hand is advising us to avoid any other living thing, stay indoors, put our head between our legs and kiss our ass goodbye.
Perhaps he might want to consider washing his foot as well as long as he is going to keep putting it in his mouth.
