Re: Oregon Flu Summit was August 21,2009
There is a common mistake that people keep making and repeating over and over again and it really needs to be corrected.
In the OregonFlu_ProbabilitiesPlanningPrep.pdf they make following statement on the third slide:
"'1957 Asian Flu' H2N2- 70,000 lost in the U.S (about double usual bad flu season)"
Now here is the problem with this statement.
While it is true that about 35,000 people die each year from the Flu, those numbers are based off of a population of over 300,000,000.
In 1957 the population in the U.S. was 171,000,000. About half of what it is today.
Therefore, when people say that 35,000 people die each year from the flu, they are talking about this 2008, not what was happening in lets say 1956.
If we use rough numbers for our analysis, we can say that there were half as many people in the U.S. in 1956 therefore we would expect about half as many deaths. So if, on average in 1956 there were 17,000 deaths each year from influenza, then having 70,000 deaths in 1957 would have been about 4 times worse than "seasonal flu".
While not placing any blame on the person that put this slide show together, I would appear that some people have lost the basic capability to compare apples to apples.
In conclusion, most likely the 1957 Asian Flu was 4 times more deadly than seasonal flu, not 2 times more likely. You can't compare death rates in 1957 to 2008 and not take into account the fact that there were half as many people in the U.S.
