Deseret News | Swine flu now a pandemic, but is it cause for panic?

Reader comments
Jay Evensen: Swine flu now a pandemic, but is it cause for panic?

Anonymous | 9:26 a.m. June 14, 2009

No. Let us know when the swine flu death toll approaches the 400,000 number; that's the number who die annual in america by tobacco. We don't panic about that, so the threshold must be higher.

JKG | 11:07 a.m. June 14, 2009

Sorry looks like there are 3 camps. The 3rd group is made of people that are NOT panicking, but preparing.

What are we preparing for? A more virulent strain of this flu in the 2nd or 3rd wave, a disruption in the supply chain because large numbers of people are ill at once, and to protect ourselves from people who WILL panic when the virus gets worse.

What have I done to prepare? 6 weeks worth of food, medical supplies, and essentials for my family. What if nothing comes of this? We'll use it all anyway. Panic? No. Prepare? Yes!

bruce | 11:17 a.m. June 14, 2009

The H5N1 virus of 1918 primarily killed young people in good health and many people died. Some of my older relatives told me stories from those days of visiting neighbors and finding whole households of otherwise healthy adults dead or dying, with unmilked cows in their barns and no one to prepare food or bury the dead. This is what is meant by a virulent disease vector. Everyone should understand that the WHO determination that H1N1 is a pandemic is based on a standard that has no measurement of virulence, and if there were some virulence factor involved, H1N1 could not be classified as pandemic.

At the same time that people are wringing their hands because of the spread of H1N1 there are more people dying from the "ordinary" flu.

Comments continue below

Anonymous | 10:56 p.m. June 14, 2009

How can we protect us?

@Anonymous | 8:20 a.m. June 15, 2009

How can us protect we?

Bessie Jones | 8:49 a.m. June 15, 2009

We need to keep hand washing top priority and cough and sneeze into tissues keep handy. When we freak we forget simple precautions. Remember we are all a unit so look out for each other when we do not feel loved and needed our immune breaks down faster.

Of course we should panic! | 10:21 a.m. June 15, 2009

Why waist a perfectly good opportunity to panic?

Or as Barak Obama's advisor (Rom Emanuel) put it... Never let a good crisis go to waste?

Play up the Swine-Flu in the media and the halls of government. We must get people worked into a panic on this one way or another or this crisis will have been a total waste! Maybe we can use it to pass more government control of healthcare or something?

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