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A comment on Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic, We Should Prepare Now. Parent comment

Re:Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic... by SpicyLemonZest on Sunday February 23, 2020 @11:50AM (#22397841)
A flu pandemic, in official terminology, is a different and more severe thing than the seasonal flu. The government regularly plans for such outbreaks and isn't afraid to spend a billion dollars when needed; for example, about 5 years ago they preemptively struck against bird flu by obliterating poultry farms at government expense. (And that one didn't even affect humans!)

I don't think you're getting your numbers from an accurate source either. The flu kills a lot more than 6k people by every estimate I've seen.

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Re:Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic... by jacquesm on Sunday February 23, 2020 @11:58AM (#22397909)
Sorry, dropped a '0' there. My bad. Edited.

Also, 'pandemic' is just about the geographic spread, not about the mortality or the rate of infection.

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Re:Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic... by SpicyLemonZest on Sunday February 23, 2020 @12:08PM (#22397981)
Normally, yes, but the seasonal flu is excluded from the definition so we don't have to say that there's an annual recurring pandemic. When agencies talk about flu pandemic preparations, they're referring to an outbreak so severe that it no longer counts as just the seasonal flu.
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Re:Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic... by jacquesm on Sunday February 23, 2020 @12:29PM (#22398130)
Right. But COVID-19 isn't influenza related so all these flu comparisons are moot as far as I'm concerned. The mortality appears for now - with all the figures that I've seen - to be much higher.

If this thing keeps going like it has for the last couple of weeks then it will make the last H1N1 pandemic look like a walk in the park. The final count on that was 100's of thousands dead in 199 different countries. And it didn't take off nearly as fast as this.

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Re:Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic... by DanBC on Sunday February 23, 2020 @01:25PM (#22398528)
But new pathogens always look much worse than they are because we haven't got testing sorted out yet. We test the very serious cases, we don't test the mild cases.
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Re:Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic... by jacquesm on Sunday February 23, 2020 @01:42PM (#22398646)
Yes, that's a good point. Especially valid because there is a very real limit on the number of test kits available. That's also a risk in case of asymptomatic spreading.
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