<p>The swine flu panic seems to have turned into much ado about nothing.</p>
<p>yea, I posted on another thread that our local high school has reported its first confirmed case, and they chose not to close the doors. Good decision, but they had the benefit from learning from other schools that did, and regretted it.</p>
<p>Our local school district closed all the schools on Monday, had a press conference yesterday reversing the decision and open back up tomorrow.</p>
<p>My son goes to a different school district that did not close, he and his friends were not too happy about that. Of course, they would also not be happy about rescheduled tests, etc.</p>
<p>Some districts jumped the gun and made the decision without consulting public health authorities. No offense intended against school superintendent’s but they are really not qualified to make public health decisions.
They really need to make the decision in consultation with the state public health department and the CDC and base it on science.</p>
<p>here are the revised CDC recomendations:
<a href=“http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/K12_dismissal.htm[/url]”>http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/K12_dismissal.htm</a></p>
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<p>Thank goodness!!</p>
<p>In our town, the board of health closed one high school. I’m not clear who authorized closing the whole district down the next week but in the annoucement yesterday they said they were following the CDC guidelines to open back up.</p>
<p>We had three confirmed cases at three highschools last Friday and they said they were closing the schools until May 18th. The hs kids here in SoCal started AP tests this week. They ended up opening the three schools back up today.</p>
<p>
Remember, though, that it’s not over. In the 1918 outbreak, there was a small outbreak in the spring. It passed and everyone thought it was done. It came back with a vengeance in the fall. There is some concern that this H1N1 will do the same thing. The good news, though, is that the CDC indicates that the H1N1 doesn’t have the same markers for virulence as the 1918 flu did.</p>
<p>Approximately 400 cases in the US.</p>
<p>The US population is what, 300 million +.</p>
<p>I still think it is much ado about nothing, fed in large part by the US media’s thirst for anything remotely newsworthy.</p>
<p>state wide map from the CDC. A county wide one would be more interesting.</p>
<p>read in the paper today the median age of hospitilizations from H1N1 is 15 years. this is extremely young and not the norm for “seasonal” influenza.</p>
<p>UMDAD - yes the media has gotten carried away. The CDC and WHO have acted appropriately however. The problem is the general public can’t understand that just because the CDC and WHO are taking action that they have no reason to panic. Folks also don’t understand basic public health vocabulary - like “pandemic”.
This simply refers to geography and doesn’t mean we will all get sick and die.</p>
<p>My point is that if you shout “PANDEMIC” enough on the tv, internet and radio, the “general public” will freak! And they did.</p>
<p>I blame the folks in the media that have been screaming “PANDEMIC” from day one, not the general public for reacting. It really doesn’t matter what it means, it is a scary word.</p>
<p>I heard on one of the news programs that the Obama adminsitration was not letting the scientists from CDC go public. They wanted to contain it and keep the message coming from the Napolitano at DHS, Sebelius at HHS and whoever is acting head of CDC.
Unfortuately the constitution prevents the Wolf Blitzers of the world from inciting panic.</p>
<p>It would have been nice to have a Surgeon General go on and smack the media around a little. As much as I admisre Sanjay Gupta - he is a journalist first and has contributed to the hysteria.
Too bad the general public doesn’t have enough science education to sort it out and think for themselves. A little common sense goes a long way.<br>
The other thing is - among some factions there is a serious distruct for any message that comes from the “govt” including the CDC and public health officials. Most of these individuals know just enough to be dangerous. The 24 hour news cycle just feeds into this.</p>
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<p>Eeek! :eek:</p>
<p>PS: my first eek face…</p>
<p>I’m going to do something that is alien to my general make-up, stand up FOR the forces of government. As a laboratorian, I don’t think they particularly over-reacted. If the death rate had been even 5% in the US, you wouldn’t have heard a peep about over-reactions.
I think that some things could well have been handled better, and we are all certainly foolish if the plans and responses are not evaluated extensively and then fine tuned based on this experience. I think this was (with all respect and sympathy to the many affected families in Mexico) a relatively low impact dress rehearsal for what could be a real disaster. The theory that the next big pandemic will pop up everywhere at once and move very fast because of air travel has been soundly proven. Because of that fact, the first wave of closings and social distancing will have to be something of an “over-reaction” if we have any hope of containing the damage from the first wave, especially. We may learn that we can’t keep up with the first wave. From my perspective as someone who has a spot in the evidence chain from the coughing patient to the CDC virology lab, I can see a lot of intensive, important and fascinating reasearch going on over the next few months.</p>
<p>400/300,000,000 = 0.00000133333 or a 0.000133333% infection rate (if my math is right). We are a looonnnnggg way from a 5% death rate.</p>
<p>Let’s wait just a bit next time and see if we really have anything. “Low impact” is putting it mildly. How much did this rehearsal cost (during a major recession)?</p>
<p>Can’t they establish some realistic thresholds?</p>
<p>I am also a laboratorian and sorry but the CDC bites the big one on this. If nothing else there is the minor issue of coverup. In my area there are many hundreds of cases that are “probable” by a combination of tests. Somehow the number of confirmed cases does not seem to increase. The CDC does not want to perform the final confirmation and has been discouraging testing and now they are not accepting specimens for confirmation.</p>
<p>And everything that has been done is only an overreaction in hindsight. I can just see the posts if the illness had spread like wildfire:
“Kids were showing up with symptoms! Why the hell didn’t they close the SCHOOLS??? How stupid could they be??”</p>
<p>There was one school closed in our district, because one student exhibited the symptoms. The case is yet to be confirmed. The school was only closed for one day, because the official position on school closings was changed the day after it closed.</p>
<p>The student in question had been in Mexico for spring break. Following spring break, the student had been in class for 11 days, that is two full weeks (Mon. - Fri.) and a Monday. Weren’t all the other students exposed for those 11 days? What does closing the school on day 12 accomplish?</p>
<p>I am not trying to give anyone a hard time, I just don’t know the “science” of exposure to a flu viris.</p>
<p>The best thing that the CDC did was “passive surveillance.” I think this means they pointed a thumb upwards and then sat down. I don’t blame them for this because I really don’t think they have the capability to do much more. If this had been a nasty pandemic with a very high death rate, we would have expected more. I suspect we would have been disappointed.</p>
<p>I did a long response yesterday and lost it.
UMDad - we don’t know what the rate is because of the things Edad is talking about. “Confirmed” cases mean they are positive by PCR or culture, and in any outbreak of flu, only a few patients actually are tested to that extreme. Also as Edad pointed out, the number of specimens way out weighed the system’s ability to get them tested.
I think the gov’t didn’t over-react, also as Edad says, you could make a case that they underreactted.</p>