ruveyn wrote:
For the victim and family it is always one hundred percent. For society it is the statistical death rate. How many per one hundred thousand have died of the swine flu? How does it compare to other causes of death? Can you put this in some kind of proportion?
In the great flu epidemic of 1918 (Spanish Flu) over fifty million died world wide. That is nearly four times as many who died in The Great War. Using the Spanish Flue as a benchmark, the current swine flu hardly registers. I suspect more people are dying of food poisoning than swine flu. Many more are dying in automobile accidents (about 40,000 a year in the U.S.). Shall we give up automobiles?
ruveyn
Exactly.
There needs to be a general understanding of disease and viruses that lacks in the country. If it's a nasty virus, the old and the babies are the ones who'll see the highest mortality rate. There'll be some in the middle but those will be either from the immunocompromised or those who don't take the necessary measures to take care of themselves or are otherwise subject to complications during illness.
_________________
Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings. ~Heinrich Heine, Almansor, 1823
?I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me.? - Hunter S. Thompson