How bad is the flu?
It is all over the news these days, the swine flu from Mexico. The US has declared an emergency and the first cases have appeard in Europe.
How bad can it get? Pretty bad, actually.
We are better prepared than we were in 1918, but still, we also travel a lot more, so a pandemic can spread fast if measures are not taken.
With the scare of the bird flu the last couple of years, one would hope that goverments are prepared, but of course it can also end up with a “boy that cried wolf” situation where people do not take the flu serious enough.
This might be a bad time to go to a busy airport, but I’m off to Heathrow now…
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April 27th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Looks bad …but hey, we can use cool Google technology to track this flu in real-time:
Gizmodo: Follow-the-swine….
Hmmm… Denmark is already on the map.
April 27th, 2009 at 10:41 pm
yeah, I saw that, but not until after I posted :)
May 4th, 2009 at 9:48 am
A lot of people were traveling during 1918, as well. The end of the 1st World War. Millions upon millions of troop movements. In the fall of 1918, the very worst outbreaks in the US were at military installations and surrounding communities.
May 4th, 2009 at 11:18 am
Good point, but still … how much would troop movements matter compared to widespread travel today? I guess soldiers returning from the war would spread out pretty evenly over the communities, so I could easily see it as a major parameter…
Do you know of any place where I can read about this? I really know too little about the epidemiology of infections diseases, and pretty much zero of the history of pandemics :(