H1N1 post #2: Twice the number of US war dead by June, 2010?
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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