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The usual number used to determine the lethality of any future influenza pandemic has been an average mortality of the last three pandemics of 1918, 1957, and 1968. The 1968 pandemic was actually less lethal than the CDC's future best case scenario, while the 1918 pandemic was far more lethal than the CDC's future worst case scenario.
The 1918 pandemic probably killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide. Hospitals around the world kept track of the numbers of the dead until they, too, were overwhelmed and forced to close their doors. How many people died in their own homes or in places too remote to be properly investigated is anyone's guess. At the height of the pandemic in the US, mass graves were being used with great regularity, and priests...I kid you not...were riding the streets of Philadelphia with horses and wagons asking people to bring out their dead. New York City stopped counting the dead at about 33,000 when the pandemic was not even half over. Every major city in the US was affected by the pandemic at about the same rate.
If you use 5% (and it may very well have been higher) as the lethality rate in 1918-1919, then to kill 50 million people, 1 billion people would have to be infected. Likewise, to kill 100 million, close to 2 billion would have to be infected.
Since the world's population in 1918 was approximately 1.8 billion, it is reasonable to assume that to kill 100 million, the lethality rate would have to have been higher than originally assumed...somewhere in the 10% range...or the number of dead considerably lower.
If we split the difference, and postulate that the lethality rate of the 1918 pandemic was roughly 7%, and that approximately 75 million died, then one could also assume that approximately 1.1 billion were infected out of a total population of 1.8 billion (1.1 billion divided by 1.8 billion = 61%). Using those same numbers, the US with a population of about 100 million in 1918, would have lost more than 4 million people.
Now, let's apply those same numbers to the US population today, which is a little less than 300 million. 61% of 300 million is 183 million infected patients. Using a 7% rate of death, 12,810,000 would die in this country alone.
Worldwide, using 6.5 billion as the world's current population, 3.97 billion would be infected, and approximately 278 million would die. Even a lethality rate of 3.5%, half the number I'm using in this post, would result in almost 140 million dead worldwide, and and more than 6 million dead in the US.
Are the numbers I'm using too high? I REALLY do hope so. But keep this in mind...we currently have NO vaccine for use against H5N1, our medical personnel have not been trained on what to expect or how to react, and our fearless leaders may not even be able to SPELL pandemic, much less understand what to do if a pandemic struck tomorrow. I'd also be willing to say that most of our citizens have no clue that a pandemic might be imminent, much less what they need to be doing to get ready for one.
To be completely honest, I haven't a clue as to why the numbers proposed by the CDC are so low. It makes absolutely no sense unless they're trying to keep the general population from going into a premature state of panic.
And what of countries with little or no healthcare system? What will be the rate of infection for them, and what lethality rate can they expect?
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