H1N1 Flu Pandemic: the second wave
Colorado Springs — Somewhere, someone is speculating, right now. Soon this person will speak, and someone will hear and repeat what this person has speculated and burbled, and from there the idea will branch out and soon be reported as fact, and not speculation.
Such was the speculation on H1N1 Swine Flu and the pandemic of 2009. The idea of "wave" spread from mouth, to mouth, to that ideological branch of gossip that is the news media, and soon experts in the health-care industry were confidently reporting that a first wave had come and gone, and then a second wave, and were already speculating on a third wave.
The truth is, the "first wave" was barely said and done. It could be that when the word "wave" is spoken, people think of the 1980s phenomena of people at sporting events raising their hands above their heads and expecting the person sitting next to them to comply in duplication, and multiplication, into that buzz of collective buzz think, which seems to work wonderfully for bees, and other insects.
Applause to Time Magazine for releasing some real information about the reality that a "second wave" of pandemic h1n1 Swine Flu has not as yet occurred. How refreshing for some reality to finally be released into a society that adores "reality television" (which of course rarely has anything remotely connected to reality in its programming). From the Time piece, released Thursday, December 10, 2009:
The question now on health officials' minds is: Will there be a second wave of cases in the new year? The answer depends on whom you ask. "We took an informal poll of about a dozen of some of the world's leading experts in influenza," Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told reporters recently. "About half of them said, Yes, we think it's likely that we'll have another surge in cases. About half said, No, we think it's not likely. And one said, Flip a coin." - Time in Partnership with CNN
How refreshing to hear that beyond all the "scientific prognostication and prophecy," the very real truth is that "flipping a coin" is the origin of most of the predictions on which you are basing your health and welfare. Half of the experts said "yea" and half of experts declared "nay," but the coin flipping admission is perhaps the most honest. From December 8, 2009, two days before Time printed its ultra-honest admission:
Colorado Springs — December 2009 marks a marginal lull in the Great Pandemic 2009, and many headlines are already distributing handshakes and congratulatory pats on the back, proclaiming “it is over” and “we have won” — one headline proclaims not only that the h1n1 Swine Flu pandemic is over, but that it ended with a whimper, utterly skipping the projected bang.
Also, on December 11, 2009:
The height of flu season typically falls in January and February and Hacker assumes an increase in flu cases during those months but he doesn’t know if it will be a second wave of the H1N1 — popularly known as “swine flu” — or the typical seasonal flu variety. - By Ronnie Ellis, The Richmond Register
From December 8, 2009:
The painful — hopeful — mistake which will prove an eventual, fateful blunder, is that a “second wave” of the current pandemic has already come and gone, while the truth is that the second wave has not occurred as yet. Another wave is determined and defined by both the emergence and wildfire spread of a significant flu mutation. Trifling fluctuations in the initial infectious proliferation of the virus had statistical tacticians scrambling to describe “first waves” and “second waves” and sometimes even “third waves.” - Douglas Christian Larsen
It is an accurate reflection of how unpredictable the influenza virus can be. Although flu activity has been waning for the third week in a row, health officials warn that there are still four to five months left in the official influenza season, plenty of time for the virus to make its rounds and find new hosts. "The story of pandemics, and the story of H1N1 in general, is the story of persistent uncertainty where we never quite know what we are going to get or when," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. - Time in Partnership with CNN
Cheers to Time. It is about time.
