The sky is falling!

I'm sure you've heard about it by now ... I mean it has dominated the news for over a week already. The H1N1 virus, more common called the swine flu, is the flavor of the month for health scares that ... based on how much media attention and coverage it is getting ... is going to wipe out the human race in the next year.

Um ... okay ... whatever.

Seriously, let's put this in perspective. The United States has a population that is listed as 306,353,082 people; we'll just call it 300,000,000 or 'over 300 million' will probably work just as well. The World Health Organization (WHO .... why do I always think of an old British Sci-Fi series?) has confirmed 985 cases in 20 countries worldwide.

Um ... 985 cases? Yeah we'll stick with the 300 million number. So if all of those 985 cases were in the U.S. we'd be talking about roughly .00033% (less than since I'm not including over 6 million people). That 985 cases are not all in the U.S., however. The rough worldwide population is 6.7 billion ... with a B.

So if my math is right we're talking about an illness that has infected roughly .0000147% or less of the worldwide population.

Admittedly this is a 'young' pandemic, being only 10 days old, but still we aren't talking about something that's burning through the population like wildfire either ... even in Mexico which has shown the heaviest concentration of confirmed cases (506 confirmed cases and 19 deaths or roughly a 3% fatality rate) we are still talking about a very small percentage of the population being infected.

Not to say that people shouldn't take reasonable precautions to avoid catching it, but I really don't believe that this is likely to balloon into something worthy of the extreme media coverage and hype that it has been getting to date.

I honestly feel that the media is making this into a much bigger issue than it is, and through their constant coverage they are, in fact, generating the panic that they are covering. I wouldn't go so far as to say that they are intentionally trying to generate a panic over this flu ... rather I think in their hunger to find and report a story that they have a tendency to over dramatize the issue which creates a little fear. The media then reports on the fear, which in turn generates more fear and more news coverage....

On the political front a 'pandemic' like this and the panic (as caused and fed by the media over coverage) has a tendency to drive DC as 'justification' for Universal Health Care. The hysteria over the issue becomes an excellent vehicle for Congress to hook the wagon up to in order to lessen the opposition to the issue. 'You can't be opposed to government stepping into health care right now ... we're facing a pandemic! If the US Government doesn't step in by passing UHC this week we might never recover!'

Yes, I'm purposefully exaggerating there, but we do have a White House and Congress that doesn't like to 'let a good crisis go to waste.'

Is it serious? Yes, and people need to be aware of the dangers ... H1N1 is credited with the deaths of over 40 million people worldwide in 1918 (when it was known as the Spanish Flu). We have to accept that better medical facilities, awareness, and not being in the middle of trench warfare is likely to keep this from being quite the pandemic that the Spanish Flu turned into. (Not to mention that it's also possible (and even likely) that many of the 1918 deaths might have been incorrectly attributed to the virus.)

The other danger here is simple ... the more they blow this up now, when it's really not as big an issue as the coverage would have it seem, the less likely people are to get worked up about it later if it or another strain suddenly becomes a major threat to the health of the country ... There was the bird flu a couple of years ago, and the asian flu, and the SARS scare ... all of which certainly were dangers, but if I learned anything over the years it is that the more you cry 'wolf' over this or any other such issue (hurricanes, etc) the more likely people are to ignore it when the 'real thing' comes along.