Predicting Swine Flu Deaths: A Lesson In Insanity

The headline from USA Today August 25^th, 2009 is FLU COULD INFECT HALF OF USA 90,000 deaths, 2 million patients possible (see here for the rest of the article)

This report released by the White House is further proof that people who work for the government take drugs – lots of them.  I wish they’d listen to the Grateful Dead when they’re stoned instead of writing press releases.

This is total insanity.  I mean look at Mexico – did half the population get Swine Flu in Mexico?  Did one tenth?  One twentieth?  One hundredth?  No! A few hundred died but few of those were laboratory confirmed and we have no way of knowing if a few hundred people die every spring in Mexico due to flu-like illnesses.

And Mexico is poor, and many parts have terrible sanitation.  Why would America have a 50% infection rate with 90,000 deaths?

Further, in Mexico the entire epidemic peaked and started to disappear in around a month.  Why would America be worse than a third world country?

Bloomberg News quoted Peter Gross, chief medical officer at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey saying the predictions seem “overblown.”

“Influenza, you can make all the predictions you want, but it’s more difficult than predicting the weather,” Gross said in a telephone interview after the advisory report was made public. “If influenza was a stock, I wouldn’t touch it.”