I noticed in The Sun today the front page headline:
Shock Leap In Victims… Swine Flu Kills 12 in 4 Days
Just for comparison, each year there are 3-4,000 deaths associated with flu in the UK – that works out at 11 every day over the whole year! And if you allow for the fact flu season is only about 4 months long – December to March is the peak time – then daily deaths could be as high as 33! In a typical year up to about 8 million people in the UK could catch flu. This is normal flu, you understand.
Yet The Sun is trying to stir up Swine Flu panic over 12 deaths in 4 days. You get more people killed in car accidents than that!
Then you have to consider how many cases there are: in the UK, 7,447 cases and 7 deaths (as at 6 July, 2009) – or less than 0.1% death rate – and most of those had other health complications.
If we use The Sun’s figures of 85,000 cases and 29 deaths then the death rate is 0.03% – it’s actually gone down, and yet they’re still talking it up!
(Note that I make no claims for good statistics with those simple numbers – but they’re a damn site better statistics than The Sun is using to try and create panic).
Swine Flu is no more deadly than normal flu (and I’d love to see an animation for an annual outbreak of normal flu like the one they’ve done for Swine Flu on the BBC site). The current epidemic (I use that word in a very general sense for brevity) is just an outbreak of flu. If anything, it looks like more people will have had it by the time it dies down, but that’s all.
It won’t wipe out the Human Race – but don’t forget to take your Oinksip just in case…
Oinksip - For Swine Flu