Lincolnite

This “crisis” feels a little too ‘manufactured’ for my tastes. I think Texas was moderately premature in shutting everything down, but maybe I will be wrong and in 2 weeks we will think they were geniuses. I think Fort Worth closing every school for the next 10 days is a little over the top, personally.

There are several reasons for the concern over this outbreak.

It’s a new strain, not seen before.

It’s not flu season.

It’s seems highly contagious, person to person - no swine needed.

There’s no vaccine.

If true, the fact that many deaths were among 20-50 year olds, is very disurbing.  It’s expected that fatalities will be among the very young, very old and ill.  Not those with the healthiest immune systems.  This mimicks the pattern of the 1918 outbreak which killed anywhere from 20 to 100 million people.

That said… that there are no deaths in the US or any other country is very good.  Either the virus has mutated to a less virulent strain or health care/delivery in Mexico is poorer than thought.

While is may seem over-reacting to shut down Fort Worth schools, this really is one area - communicable disease - where over-reaction is FAR better than no reaction.

It’s not a “crisis” yet, but I part of that is luck (mutating virus) and awareness (handwashing, closing schools, etc)

By the way, if you haven’t ever had the flu - you don’t know what you’re missing.  And I’m not talking about the “24 hour flu” or the “stomach flu” (ain’t no such things).  I had it about 10 years ago and can only descibe the feeling as being what being thrown from an airplane must feel like.  Every square centimeter hurt.  I couldn’t even sit up for 2 days.  Eventually got me to the doctor for the first time in 10 years.  Took about 6 days to clear the main symptons, and 2 months of residual coughing…  it’s a scary disease.

Either the virus has mutated to a less virulent strain or health care/delivery in Mexico is poorer than thought.

There’s at least one other possibility: that the number of infected individuals in Mexico is far higher than thought, but most people either didn’t seek treatment or were misdiagnosed. Diagnosis rates in other countries (and now in Mexico) are naturally much higher due to the global attention given to the worries of a pandemic.

As for the flu, I already did that and it sucked.

Isn’t it weird how we take the lessons of the 1918 Flu Outbreak very seriously, but there are tons of other lessons in history we never learn from?

We have not been contacted by alien life because we simply are not worthy enough to be visited.  The hysteria over this is the best example.  I even had to register a new domain name just to blather about it on the internets.

www.(4 letter swear word that starts with F)swineflu.com There be a bit of harsh language over there.

This might be my new favorite site!

A lot has changed since 1918. I don’t think that’s a valid comparison at all.

I agree that there are flues and then there are *flues*.  I had one in the 90s and at one point I was literally dictating an abbreviated, delirious and rambling Last Will.  Kind of freaked out the family but that’s exactly how it felt.

In my adult life I have only had a real bad flu once, and that was during the end of the year 2000 outbreak (really put a damper on my vacation as I was holidaying in NYC too). I couldn’t shake the fever I had for about 2 weeks, and the only way I could function was by taking 2-3 tylenol every few hours. Bad stuff, real bad stuff.