{"id":1307,"date":"2009-07-17T14:12:04","date_gmt":"2009-07-17T14:12:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=1307"},"modified":"2009-07-17T14:12:04","modified_gmt":"2009-07-17T14:12:04","slug":"swine-flu-media-frenzy-continues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=1307","title":{"rendered":"Swine Flu Media Frenzy Continues"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I noticed in <a title=\"The Sun - Swine Flu Scaremongering\" href=\"http:\/\/www.thesun.co.uk\/sol\/homepage\/news\/2537577\/Health-chiefs-swamped-by-swine-flu.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> The Sun today the front page headline<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Shock Leap In Victims&#8230; Swine Flu Kills 12 in 4 Days <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Just for comparison, each year there are 3-4,000 deaths associated with flu in the UK &#8211; <strong>that works out at 11 every day over the whole year!<\/strong> And if you allow for the fact flu season is only about 4 months long &#8211; December to March is the peak time &#8211; then <strong>daily deaths could be as high as 33!<\/strong> In a typical year up to <strong>about 8 million people in the UK<\/strong> could catch flu.<strong> <\/strong>This is <em>normal<\/em> flu, you understand.<\/p>\n<p>Yet  The Sun  is trying to stir up Swine Flu\u00a0panic over 12 deaths in 4 days. You get more people killed in car accidents than that!<\/p>\n<p>Then you have to consider <a title=\"BBC Online - Swine Flu Cases\" href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/uk\/8083179.stm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> how many cases there are<\/a>: in the UK, 7,447 cases and 7 deaths (as at 6 July, 2009) &#8211; or less than 0.1% death rate\u00a0&#8211; and most of those had other health complications.<\/p>\n<p>If we use  The Sun&#8217;s  figures of 85,000 cases and 29 deaths then the death rate is 0.03% &#8211; it&#8217;s actually gone down, and yet they&#8217;re still talking it up!<\/p>\n<p>(Note that I make no claims for good statistics with those simple numbers &#8211; but they&#8217;re a damn site better statistics than  The Sun  is using to try and create panic).<\/p>\n<p>Swine Flu is no more deadly than normal flu (and I&#8217;d love to see an animation for an annual outbreak of normal flu like the one they&#8217;ve done for Swine Flu on the  BBC  site). The current <em>epidemic<\/em> (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&#8217;s all.<\/p>\n<p>It won&#8217;t wipe out the Human Race &#8211; but don&#8217;t forget to take your Oinksip just in case&#8230;<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1086\" style=\"width: 439px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1086\" class=\"size-full wp-image-1086 lazyload\" title=\"Oinksip - For Swine Flu\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/oinksip.jpg\" alt=\"Oinksip - For Swine Flu\" width=\"429\" height=\"500\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB3aWR0aD0iMSIgaGVpZ2h0PSIxIiB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciPjwvc3ZnPg==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 429px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 429\/500;\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-1086\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Oinksip - For Swine Flu<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I noticed in The Sun today the front page headline: Shock Leap In Victims&#8230; Swine Flu Kills 12 in 4 Days Just for comparison, each year there are 3-4,000 deaths associated with flu in the UK &#8211; that works out at 11 every day over the whole year! And if you allow for the fact [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[99,102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funny-related","category-general-related"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}