Are anyone on the right really attacking Obama on Swine Flu? If you say it’s so, then I believe it, but I have not seen a single instance.

Sorry for the triple post but this is really starting to bug me – especially coming from the ‘never let a good crisis go to waste administration’.

A little caution is a good thing. Over caution, however, leads to no good.

Something is not right.

As far as the press goes: Roger’s completely right for tweaking their inability to properly set context, but what goes unsaid is that it’s actually rather accurate to call this a “pandemic”. An “epidemic” is, in loose terms, nothing more than an increase over the norm for a period of time (from what I recall from long-ago college classes, that’s typically set to be a year, although I should be corrected on this if I’m not remembering correctly). A “pandemic” are points of epidemics in multiple, distinct geographic regions. So technically, this “swine flu” event is indeed a “pandemic” in that there are multiple points across the globe with more incidents than the baseline. It’s just that the numbers themselves are pretty low, but they meet the definitions, so that’s why the terms are used.

However, despite the numbers (and while I’m at it, in getting back to John Moore’s post) we still need to pay attention to the trends here, because the potential danger inherent in a second wave (like John said: “… it may come back next winter as a major danger (more virulent).“) is definitely something to be concerned about. Science and history tells us that the second wave of pandemics tend to be bad; as an aside, that’s one piece of context I wish the mainstream news outlets would communicate! The Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 also had a light, mild first wave, but the second one eventually killed over 20 million. And that was with an infection that had a death rate of only 2.5%; the numbers of people that had to be infected to result in that number of deaths is staggering. At any rate, it’s not this round of infections I’m worried about.

While I would fault the news for being behind, late, and lackadaisical at getting context reported, let alone reported correctly, I still think it’s important enough for them to cover it as much as they have. I’d only quibble about properly setting the context, and for not putting much out there on why early measures, as alarmist as some of them are, are important. Better to nip a new variant in the bud than set a new chapter of edpidemiologic history.