The Mysteriously Shrinking Swine Flu Death Toll

reply to post by Memysabu


They don't get it. If this thing become a real pandemic, we will be talking about 2 million dead americans, not 36,000. If the mortality rate of this virus is exactly like the spanish flu of 1918, .645 % (less than one percent), then 2,000,000 million Americans die. Over a hundred million people all over the world.

reply to post by finemanm


No, you greatly underestimate. If you use the confirmed numbers for Mexico, 400 infected, 19 dead, you get a 5% death rate.

If you use the suspected numbers, it could go as high as 20% death rate in Mexico.

At 5% that would be 15.3 Million Americans dead.

I posted a thread about this when the 7 figure first came out and all these responses came back about how it was the end of the world and there was a mexican conspiracy to hide the true casualty figure. Those people posting blogs and comments had to know the true story from their obviously factual anecdotal evidence.

The first rule of disasters is the casualty figure will be inflated, makes for better reading.

I don't know what the truth is. I only have the jumbled up numbers they give us.

I do know that either they do not want us to know the real numbers, good or bad, or they don't really care enough to get real numbers.

I am not trying to hype this. The potential is scary. Lots of people think it is nothing. I want to believe that it is nothing, and so far it does look hyped.

But if it is something bad and we do not proper measures, then the bad scenario becomes the worst case scenario.

All too often our leaders make things worse by concealing the truth. By now all the dead in mexico should have either been confirmed or excluded.
The only figures I can find are that 19 are confirmed out of 170, and no published figure for how many of the remaining 161 were excluded, and how many were not tested.

reply to post by finemanm

Just looked at the disease map at flutracker.rhizalabs.com.... Southwest of Mexico City shows a location with 800 suspected infected and 57 deaths, about 7%, like the spanish flu. If this is going to be the norm in the future of the US, that means of the 300 million residents, 21 million deaths. I doubt it would go worldwide for all populations, but if it did: 420 million deaths. Still not enough to lower the population to 500 million, the desired number by the stone monument in Georgia.

[edit on 3-5-2009 by Jim Scott]

reply to post by Jim Scott


The 1918 Spanish flu killed 3% of the infected, and infected 1/3 of the population. So 1% of population was killed.

I suspect they seriously underestimated the number of infected in Mexico.

An interesting aspect of the difference in this current Mexican flu and seasonal flu is that the .6% who die of seasonal flu die of pneumonia 4 to 6 weeks later.

The ones who die of the Mexican flu take a turn for the worse after about 3 days of showing symptoms, and die of pneumonia rather quickly.

With the Spanish flu the first wave was mild, the second wave in the fall was the killer.

This just came in, WHO rss feed "Influenza A(H1N1) - update 13" - "As of 06:00 GMT, 4 May 2009, 20 countries have officially reported 985 cases of influenza A (H1N1) infection."

Its just a matter of time before who up it to phase 6, too many countries are affected now.

reply to post by reugen


At this point, the count is based on tests which are backed up because they cannot process them fast enough. They have stopped testing mild suspected cases.

Now they are only testing severe cases.

The statistics are basically bogus. The only number which will mean anything from this point on is the death toll.