Larry Page "providing free flu shots to all San Francisco bay area kids"

Re:Larry Page "providing free flu shots to all San Francisco... by CodeCube on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:17PM (#4887941)

It would be nice if he's just being magnanimous, but I actually hope it's an experiment ... will there be a notable difference in flu rates in the area as a result of this? will there be any other statistical blips that can be correlated to fewer infections? I'm hoping they're tracking the heck out of this effort :P

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Re:Larry Page "providing free flu shots to all San Francisco... by ck2 on Friday December 07, 2012 @12:21PM (#4887966)

I vaguely remember Google had a flu tracker last year.

Ah here it is http://www.google.org/flutrends/

You are right, it will be interesting to see if this makes a difference statistically.

Unfortunately their tracker doesn't go down to metro areas, only state.

Oh wait, there are a few cities, here is SF http://www.google.org/flutrends/us/#1014221

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Re:Larry Page "providing free flu shots to all San Francisco... by danielweber on Friday December 07, 2012 @01:03PM (#4888204)

It probably won't even show up. There have been some unintentional experiments with the flu vaccine, such as the year production got botched or that the people in charge of predicting which strains to include guessed wrong. There were no noticeable increases in sickness or morbidity in those years.

Don't take this too far; the data is very noisy and maybe it was there and we just didn't see it. Flu vaccines do seem to work in labs and in small community experiments.

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