I agree with you on much of what you say. However, the facts seem to indicate that 'flu' is showing a massive increase in incidence. How much of this is H1N1 is subject to question. A second point is that even with health care workers, the higher incidence, seems to be related to a lack of taking basic precautions against infection spread. ie. Washing hands and face masks when attending infected individuals.
The major point I am trying to make is that statistics are indicating a massive flu epidemic, most of which is going unreported in the press, in favor of talk about a particular strain that has not proven to be as deadly as feared, but is still really neat to talk and write about. Meanwhile the flu is on its way to killing record numbers of individuals.
As a personal note, I got my flu shot, and then caught this flemmy kind of flu that laid me out for a few days and stayed with me for about six weeks. It did the same to a lot of my co-workers. We are all nurses and nurse assistants. The cost to the facility in hiring temps was tremendous. It has damn near crippled the budget of the facility. Patient care is suffering a bit as a result. Many facilities suffered similar problems, many industries were effected as well. This went pretty much unreported. At the same time the press was dithering on about H1N1 with few infections hitting the community. My point is that what kills you is to be feared, what may kill you is to be recognized but need not be feared. There are too many what ifs about H1N1, there are no what ifs about the severity of the flu outbreak this year. It is here and it is killing people and costing us a large amount of money. |
