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Pandemic Flu Monitor: Flu Activity Drops for Fourth Straight Week, CDC Reports
Are you starting to wonder if the pandemic is going to end up being like the Y2K crisis?
Remember? We were worried about how all the financial institutions in the world might crash because no one had planned far enough ahead (except companies who wrote 30-year mortgages) to convert their computer programs to recognize 2000 for any transaction involving the date change-over.
Many companies threw a lot of money at upgrades, doing test runs and trying to assure themselves that they had done all that they could, just in case Y2K was almost like the end of the Internet world as we knew it.
New Year, 2000, dawned. The banks kept banking. The Internet kept up its millisecond beat. Yawn.
It is too soon to tell how closely the pandemic planning resembles the Y2K experience.
There has been a lot of worry on the part of public health officials for good reasons. The World Health Organization has sometimes expressed its position in stronger language than our own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) although the majority of the cases are in the Americas.
It is not a waste to take all appropriate measures when facing an unprecedented problem which can cause disastrous effects.
H1N1 is one of those situations which happen every few decades or so.
People should not let their guards down just yet. As is the case in a normal flu season, the same precautions apply.
The regular flu is a killer, too, every single year.
“The level of flu activity across the nation has dropped for the fourth week in a row, federal health officials reported Monday, indicating that the second wave of the swine flu pandemic in the United States had peaked.
“While officials warned that the number of people getting infected with the H1N1 virus remained high, and cases could surge again, the extended period of falling activity suggested the intensity of the outbreak had reached a high.
“We’re certainly on the downward slope of the curve,” said Thomas Skinner, spokesman for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
“The CDC noted, however, that 27 deaths from swine flu among people younger than age 18 had been confirmed in the most recent week–the largest one-week tally of pediatric deaths since the pandemic started–bringing the total to more than 200 children. Only about 40 or 50 children usually die from the flu during an entire flu season.
“Skinner said officials were hesitant to use the term “peak” because of concerns about creating the impression that the outbreak was over.
“We’re far from being out of the woods,” Skinner said. “There’s still a lot of flu out there. And we wouldn’t be surprised to see another uptick in activity as we approach the end of December and beginning of January, when kids come back from Christmas break.”
Source: Washington Post, November 30, 2009
