p>The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cautiously acknowledge on its Web page that it is quite possible that “the only cases currently being reported are those in the most severely ill people.” Random samples — the life blood of statistics — are hard to obtain under the best of circumstances, and canvassing poor people in rural Southeast Asia certainly doesn’t qualify.
Avian Flu
Written by
in
Comments
-
I’m not an expert on epidemiology, but an article in (I think) TNR made an interesting point. High mortality rates are not necessarily a bad thing. It means that the virus does not have time to spread, and often just kills itself. The Spanish flu had a low mortality rate, so it spread to a larger number of people.
After all, what is worse … 15% of 1000 cases, or 50% of 100 cases.
Dom -
So am I supposed to panic or not? I’m on the edge of running out to buy cases of bottled water, canned goods and surgical masks, but I’d feel like an idiot to spend all that money and then have it turn out not to be a big killer. I hate our modern Cult of Paranoia, very hard to live in.
-
Buy gasoline, a gun, and a hell of a lot of ammo. Don’t you read? Realistically speaking, your first concern is going to have to be the zombies. You must shoot them in the brain. Only the brain will do.
After the first week or two, when the zombies die down (so to speak), you’ll be threatened by men wearing leather and steel spikes, driving bizarrely modified automobiles and howling gibberish in Australian accents. That’s when it gets tough, because they’re going to want your gasoline (or “petrol”, as the zombies call it). You’ll need to make an airplane of some kind. And that’s when you’ll be glad you’ve stocked up on giant buzzards. They eat like pigs, but nobody can haul a glider like a really well-trained team of giant buzzards.
Good luck, and God bless.
P.S. Don’t even think about my MREs. Every man for himself, buddy. I’m armed to the teeth.
Leave a Reply