I took a screenshot because I am talking about right now, the 119th day of 2009. Ok, so this flu has been attributed to one death. Now let's focus on the regular Influenza virus. According to the CDC, the Influenza virus is the cause of about 36000 deaths a year. (source) Again with the screenshot, click to enlarge:
So, that's about 98 people per day that die of regular influenza. So lets crunch the numbers.
Let's assume that there are about 304,000,000 people in the United States, (google: US Population). Lets use the numbers from the Regular Flu. 5% of the US gets flu (low number). 5% of the population is 15,200,000. Divide the number of deaths by the number of infections and you get 0.2% (36000 deaths / 15200000 cases) of the people who get Influenza die. Swine flu is higher, at just over 1% (1 death / 91 cases). So, the odds that you'll die from the swine flu are 5 times greater, it's still only about 1% chance of dying.
Now for a little perspective: The SARS outbreak of 2003 had 8096 recorded cases with 774 deaths... the odds of dying with SARS back in the day was an amazing 9.6% (source).
My take on this If you get the flu (swine or regular) go see a doctor and get some chicken soup because you'll be sick for a few days. It's not as bad as SARS was yet.
(for you punks that say "what about 20% of the us" here are those numbers. 20% of 304 M = 60.8M people. Divide out the deaths and you get 0.05% [36000 / 60.2M], so the percentage is less, but the difference between 0.2% and 0.05% is nominal, let the flame war ensue!)
The Masked Crusader dot com
2 comments:
An update.. As of Monday, May 4, the united states has 226 confirmed cases and still only one death, bringing the odds down to 0.4424779% (1/226), only slightly above that of the normal flu.
Update: Monday, May 11, According to the CDC website, there have been 2532 confirmed cases in 44 states with 3 confirmed deaths. This brings the odds of death down BELOW the odds of dying with the regular flu. If you remember, the odds of dying by the regular flu by my calculations was 0.2%. The above numbers bring the odds of dying by the swine flu down to 0.11% chance.
If you wanna try your hand at creating your own pandemic, try this game: Pandemic II
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