I Can't Help Myself, I'm Obsessed!

I tried very hard not to look at any more swine flu stuff, and I was successful yesterday. Today, however, is a different story. In my readings, I found some more very interesting stuff. I'll share some of it with you.

First off, I'll give you the new graph that I generated using numbers from the CDC website.


Basically, this shows that numbers aren't leveling off at the moment. It doesn't seem like they will be too soon.

We also have a new death from the flu in the United States. So everyone can stop saying that it was only one death, a toddler from Mexico. Here is a little snipped from the news story I read about this death. It comes from "Second swine flu death reported in the US" on Hurriyet Daily News.com.

Texas health officials late on Tuesday announced the first death of a U.S. resident with swine flu, and said she was a 33-year-old schoolteacher who had recently given birth to a healthy baby. The only other swine flu death in the U.S. was of a Mexico City baby who also had underlying health problems and had been visiting relatives in Brownsville, near Harlingen. He died last week at a Houston children's hospital.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, said it expected "more cases, more hospitalizations and more deaths from this outbreak" in the weeks ahead. But at the same time, health authorities eased the restrictions for school closures, a move seen as a possible sign that the worst of the outbreak might well be over.

The CDC expects "more cases, more hospitalizations and" WHAT!?! "more deaths" from the swine flu. If the CDC is expecting it, then so should we. I understand that the flu normally kills a shit ton of people every year, but I still think this seems much worse than just the common flu. If it were just a regular flu, the CDC wouldn't be tracking it and sending out millions of doses of antiviral drugs out to all the states.

Another interesting article that I read is from blogger Leva Cygnet at Firefox News. In his article, "Crunching Some Swine Flu Numbers", he gives us some scenarios of how this could play out. I'm not sure what qualifications he has to make these predictions, but they seem reasonably sound to me. Given that it was written over a week ago, and the flu has been spreading pretty wildly over the last week, I think we should give him a little credit.

Let's hope that this isn't as bad as it might seem. But in the meantime, don't go kissing any pigs.