| HappySqurriel said: H1N1 was always a joke, and way overblown by the media. When you compared the projected number of infections and death tolls of the worst case scenario, H1N1 was only ever projected to be a moderately worse strain of the influenza virus than what we were used to. Why it was so universally over-blown is simple, the news media thrives on making people afraid and never putting information into perspective. Much like how a kidnapping 300km away will (often) be used to instil fear in parents to ensure that they watch the evening news "to learn how to protect their children against these dangers", the H1N1 virus was used simply to boost ratings. |
Sorry, I missed this earlier.
I understand the whole "fear factor" behind the media, that stories of doomsday sells papers. But behind the media coverage there was still a significant risk from swine flu to take preventative action.
It differed from seasonal flu in that it had the potential to infect millions of people over a wide area, just like the Spanish flu where nearly 40% of the world's population was infected, as almost no-one had a natural immunity to swine flu. Unlike seasonal flu it could infect everyone, and not just those susceptible to seasonal flu like the elderly or the weak.
As you said, the Spanish flu scenario was the worst case scenario, but there was a significantly high enough chance of that kind of scenario occuring to take extensive preventative measure.
Imagine working out swine flu on a risk chart and you'll understand. You have two main variables when calculating risk, impact and probability. Swine flu could have had a potentially catastrophic impact if it had reached its full potential infection rate. This wouldn't matter if the probability of this occurring was insignificant, but it wasn't. The probability of it occurring was significantly high enough. This warranted extensive preventative measures to attempt to reduce the probability of the potentially catastrophic impact.
