Interesting post. Thank you.
I’d like to comment on the following part, but please bear in mind that I’m not shooting the messenger.
I found this:
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that between three and five million people worldwide get a serious case of the regular flu each year; tens of millions get milder cases. Between 250,000 and 500,000 people globally die of the flu every year.
I also found this fact:
in a normal year, influenza infects 20% of the population, and in an epidemic, it can infect 35%. (multiple sources)
Hard to argue with the WHO as those figures are pretty widely available, but I see some conflict in that second set of figures. Again, let me emphasize that this is no criticism of yourself, only of some of your sources.
An epidemic is simply an infectious disease that affects a significant percentage of a community or region at one time. I’d expect that you know this, but some members might not be sure about what it means. So, just to clarify, it does not have to mean that an entire nation or even a large region is affected. Whether or not the outbreak is defined as an epidemic by health authorities usually depends on the infection rate in that area/community, rather than on raw figures of infections versus the country’s entire population. Of course, if the epidemic spreads to all regions then national figures will apply.
This is why in Ukraine, although they have “an epidemic”, they also have regions which are still below the “epidemic threshold”, because the number of people infected as a percentage of those regions’ populations is still relatively low. So, it gets confusing. The country has “an epidemic”, but that doesn’t mean all of the country is fully in the grip of this epidemic. Not yet, anyway.
While it’s true that there are regional epidemics of seasonal flu every year, and in epidemics the infection rate can often be 10% - 20%, that’s a long way from saying that influenza infects 20% of the population in a normal year, which by implication means the whole population of a country (or the world). An infection rate of 20% in a defined region or community is an epidemic but your source implies it’s not, by continuing “…and in an epidemic…”.
Taking this from my local perspective, we get flu epidemics virtually every year. Last winter we had one in a major regional city in the country’s NE. Schools were closed there for a couple of weeks. But we didn’t have school closures here in Prague because while we had flu cases, they were not at a high enough level to warrant it. They were at sub-epidemic levels. So, it wasn't an epidemic of the whole population, just regional.
On the good side: the figures for the global pandemics that you quoted tally quite well with reliable sources and support the concept that pandemics occur at intervals. Also, when they arrive, they typically occur in “waves”, meaning that a pandemic doesn’t just come along for a few months and then disappear. It typically comes back again after a break, then can return yet again later. This is well on the cards for Ukraine, and more so if this new outbreak dramatically spreads further afield and is then determined to be pandemic in nature.
Best regards,
Mike
Edited for typos...
[edit on 7/11/09 by JustMike]
