Jones Beene <[email protected]> wrote:
> It is possible that many flu deaths there could have been intentionally > labeled as the known types, in order to prevent public panic. > I doubt it. Anyway, full-scale public panic is underway, so if that happened, it did not work. Panic is fully justified, in this case. > For instance, in the USA our CDC estimates that so far this flu season > there have been at least 29 million of the regular flue illnesses, 280,000 > hospitalizations and 16,000 *deaths. * > > That is huge! > It is a little above normal. Not huge. You can project the likely number of people who will die in the U.S. if the Wuhan flu become endemic here before a vaccine is developed and deployed. 40% of the U.S. adult population gets a flu shot, so it is immune to seasonal flu. All doctors and nurses get the shot, so they can treat patients with seasonal flu with no danger to themselves, and without protective gear. There is no vaccination for the Wuhan flu, so 100% of the population will be susceptible, including doctors and nurses. Assume 1/3 of the population get the flu, which is approximately how many got the 1918 pandemic influenza. Assume the mortality rate is 2% instead of 0.1%. It adds up to very roughly 300,000 deaths. Not as many as AIDS, 659,000, but it will happen quickly, over a year or two. > China is more than 4 times more populous than the USA and has > sub-standard health care in many places . . . > Chinese hospitals in major cities are as good as any in the U.S. Overall, Chinese healthcare is better, measured in infant mortality, longevity, and other public health, especially when you consider how many men there still smoke. Chinese rural healthcare is bad, but nothing like the nightmare of U.S. rural healthcare, which is below the standards of most third-world countries. Rich Americans live 20 years longer than poor Americans, and low-income American men have approximately the longevity of men living in Sudan. Several American counties have a shorter life expectancy than Cambodia does. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/22/opinion/sunday/china-united-states-health.html American hospitals are filthy and dangerous. I was shocked by conditions when I had to spend several hours in one waiting for treatment, with a larger crowd of sick, miserable, coughing people. I was in considerable pain after an accident, with bleeding and a sprain and swelling, in Atlanta's number on hospital. I am used to Japanese standards. Walk into any clinic or hospital in Japan, or anywhere else in the first world or China, and the nurses would give you initial treatment to stop the bleeding, prevent infection, and ice to reduce the pain. I got nothing for a few hours. It wasn't a particularly busy time of day, or any kind of crisis. In the event of a flu pandemic, our hospitals will be instantly overwhelmed. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-american-health-care-killed-my-father/307617/ Before the crisis began, the Trump administration was trying to cut the CDC and other health agency budgets by $3 billion. I suppose they will stop that initiative. However, the people at the CDC are still overwhelmed and underfunded. My office is next door to them and I know some of the people there. They can't get enough refrigerators. They have a vaccine for SARS that might be effective against the new Wuhan flu species, but they don't have the money to test it.
