Epic flu might be easing in state
When you read that headline, you think, my God, thousands must be sick, and hundreds must be dying.
Er. No.
Nine Hoosiers died last week from H1N1 influenza, nearly doubling the number of such deaths in the state since June.(...)
Since June, H1N1 has killed 19 Indiana residents. Hospitalization rates for influenza and pneumonia increased by 41 percent in the past three weeks, particularly in northeast and southeast Indiana.
(...)
Jessica Walters, 25, Lafayette, arrived about 2 p.m. and stood in line three hours with her children, Megan, 4, and Nathan, 3, to get shots. She's troubled by estimates that up to 90,000 people could die from the flu nationally.
"When you look at numbers like that, you don't want to leave your house," she said.
Numbers like what, hon? I have yet to see an actual number for those who got the flu, and I've heard reliable reports that doctors are classifying all flu cases -- including seasonal flu -- as H1N1. So even if the numbers are in the hundreds or thousands, they're still skewed -- and the vast majority of the 6 million people in this state demonstrably don't have the flu at all, despite the for-all-intents-and-purposes unavailability of the H1N1 vaccine and the apparent wishes and hopes of the media for a big "if it bleeds it leads" headline story.
So, hey, Gannett Star? This was epic flu, OK?
FYI: There were "approximately 10,000 deaths" from the 1918-1919 pandemic in Indiana. I don't think we're anywhere close to that yet. Again, that's epic. 19 deaths in Indiana since June pales in comparison.
That only 19 people have died of something that killed 500 times more people 90 years ago indicates how much better our health care system is today than 90 years ago.
Particularly given how our state's population has grown over the last 90 years.
Perhaps we are cleaner and take better care of ourselves, but in all fairness, healthy adults suffered the most from the 1918-1919 H1N1 variant precisely because they had robust immune systems.
Sure, I'll grant that containment and cleanliness have something to do with the lower rates of infection and death from the current variant, but it's even more likely that the current variant simply isn't as virulent as the media would seemingly prefer it to be.
The Left wants us living in fear, so that we turn more and more to the government to protect us. The media is a willing pawn in that process, and stories like the one I note are proof.
The only thing "epic" here is the epic fail that is the Indianapolis Star.
Oh, and FWIW, the state population has only more-or-less doubled since 1920. So a proportionately "epic" pandemic would have to kill upwards of 20,000 in Indiana to come anywhere close to what the 1918-1919 pandemic did.
Jessica sounds like an idiot to me.