For those of you following the H1N1 pandemic news, here is some more information for you regarding the "crisis" (also see previous H1N1 post if you are interested).
My (admittedly very basic) analysis shows that the number of daily worldwide deaths due to swine flu has plateaued at 50 or so. As a matter of fact, the 7-day moving average may actually be trending downward, but that is not real clear yet. A huge majority (90%) of the world's population lives north of the equator and this might just be the calm before the flu-season storm. Who knows?
The US has 4.6% of the world population, but accounts for 14.7% of the reported H1N1 deaths. This is most likely due to better identification and reporting than due to population densities. Assuming things stay steady, this seems to imply about 2,700 Americans can expect to die from this each year for the next 3 years (the expected duration of the pandemic). This is about 20 times less than administration’s mid-range estimate, and will bump up the overall death rate in the US by 0.1%. The overall death rate from flu alone will increase by 4.8%.
Run-of-the-mill flu and pneumonia kills about 60,000 Americans every year.
As a comparison to the 2,700 estimate, 4,000 die per year in the USA in house fires and 600 die per year in lightning strikes. So my day-to-day concern is somewhere between those two things. Mind you, I am not a statistician or a medical doctor. I only can look at the information presented by official, unbiased sources and try and figure out how to interpret the numbers in a way that is meaningful to me.
Of course, if millions of people call in sick to work all at the same time our already wounded economy might be temporarily affected a tiny bit. But this might be offset by the huge amount of money being pumped into the works for vaccines, cold and flu remedies, face masks, advertising, etc, etc.
Maybe there is something to worry about, but maybe not. Any thoughts?
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