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One Flu Into The Cuckoo's Nest
Update, May 1 -- I had thought to continue adding links and excerpts to this blog but TPM now has a front page list of articles under the header:
plus a handy new muckraker thread, and there are just toooo many funny/strange things to post here. Will the Swine Flu Meme achieve Self-Awareness, or go Conscious even?? As Mexico is ramping down toward reality, some Americans are ramping up their fears and overloading hospitals with trivialities. This leads me to wonder:
Is this just an object lesson in political terrorism of the collective consciousness?
Original blog:
From TPM links --
Joe Biden (on TV and linkable but I won't) portrays the nuanced but reactionary conservative today, telling people to avoid strangers in confined spaces. Well, maybe taxis and other hired limos are okay - you can leave a window open or put up the barrier between you and the chauffeur. So Just Plain Joe is portraying the wealthy conservative, too. That's what politics and a promotion will do to ya! But see ** below for a serious idea
OTOH, as New Zealand plays games with the numbers:
What happened to stories of 149 deaths and about 2000 cases in Mexico? Well:
Oops, somebody is slacking: "Peru and Switzerland reported their first cases late Wednesday and early Thursday, respectively -- but they were not among the WHO's official tally." -- CNN
The appearance of a fast spreading epidemic may be "optics", fast spreading information and detection coupled with widespread reporting and/or disinformation. Google Releases Flu Trend Tracker Tailored For Mexico but it's not a map of confirmed or suspected cases or deaths. Instead it's a search engine feature which instead of tracking the flu tracks the 'flu' (presumably in Spanish)! Of course, what was I thinking!?
Oh, I was thinking something like this which does have a partial map which is only one day old. I want my MTV Hourly Updates!! 314 confirmed cases, 27 deaths. Hmmm, officially that's just under 9% mortality. So, again, "What happened to stories of 149 deaths and about 2000 cases in Mexico?" How about: Officials say this virus probably is only as dangerous as or less dangerous than the so-called ordinary seasonal flu: "may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu" -- 9%??
Enuf already?
An island of modest sanity (same CNN article as above):
Does this tell us anything about market behavior in general?
plus a handy new muckraker thread, and there are just toooo many funny/strange things to post here. Will the Swine Flu Meme achieve Self-Awareness, or go Conscious even?? As Mexico is ramping down toward reality, some Americans are ramping up their fears and overloading hospitals with trivialities. This leads me to wonder:
Is this just an object lesson in political terrorism of the collective consciousness?
Original blog:
From TPM links --
Joe Biden (on TV and linkable but I won't) portrays the nuanced but reactionary conservative today, telling people to avoid strangers in confined spaces. Well, maybe taxis and other hired limos are okay - you can leave a window open or put up the barrier between you and the chauffeur. So Just Plain Joe is portraying the wealthy conservative, too. That's what politics and a promotion will do to ya! But see ** below for a serious idea
OTOH, as New Zealand plays games with the numbers:
New Zealand Health Minister Tony Ryall said one traveler who a day earlier was assessed as having swine flu had been removed from the list after further checks showed that person had not been exposed to a high-risk area or to people likely infected with the virus.Maybe Biden is right:
Ryall said the government was counting 13 other people as "confirmed cases," though laboratory tests had confirmed the virus in just three people. All of those cases, including 12 students and teachers in a high school group, were aboard a flight from Los Angeles to Auckland last weekend.Some countries are closing borders. One death so far in the USA -- a Mexican baby. Let's go Dutch with another jet-setting young child who is recovering nicely:
... a 3-year-old child who recently returned from Mexico is the country's first confirmed case of swine flu.So no US deaths except for an ill-legal immigrant? Why aren't we experiencing Mexico's morbidity and mortality, doesn't NAFTA require free flow of commerce or sumthin?
What happened to stories of 149 deaths and about 2000 cases in Mexico? Well:
GENEVA, Switzerland (CNN) -- The World Heath Organization has confirmed 236 cases of swine flu infection worldwide, the agency said Thursday, a jump from 148 cases reported the previous day. The largest increase was from Mexico, which has 97 confirmed cases of the virus, compared with 26 cases WednesdayCases or new cases? C'mon folks.
Oops, somebody is slacking: "Peru and Switzerland reported their first cases late Wednesday and early Thursday, respectively -- but they were not among the WHO's official tally." -- CNN
The appearance of a fast spreading epidemic may be "optics", fast spreading information and detection coupled with widespread reporting and/or disinformation. Google Releases Flu Trend Tracker Tailored For Mexico but it's not a map of confirmed or suspected cases or deaths. Instead it's a search engine feature which instead of tracking the flu tracks the 'flu' (presumably in Spanish)! Of course, what was I thinking!?
Oh, I was thinking something like this which does have a partial map which is only one day old. I want my MTV Hourly Updates!! 314 confirmed cases, 27 deaths. Hmmm, officially that's just under 9% mortality. So, again, "What happened to stories of 149 deaths and about 2000 cases in Mexico?" How about: Officials say this virus probably is only as dangerous as or less dangerous than the so-called ordinary seasonal flu: "may not even do as much damage as the run-of-the-mill flu" -- 9%??
Enuf already?
An island of modest sanity (same CNN article as above):
"When you think pandemic, people tend to reflect on the pandemics from years past," said Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent. "Lots have changed. We are better taking care of people in hospitals, we have anti-viral medications. It doesn't mean everyone's going to die."** And as hinted above we present a technical factor built around Biden's remarks:
That's the problem with flu pandemics. They're dependent on collective action. An individual who takes non-essential plane flights -- even to Mexico, cause tickets are now cheap, and really, what are the chances? -- is making a rational decision based on individual probabilities. But if everyone does that, then we're hurtling towards a full-blown pandemic.
Which is why the absolute best case is that Joe Biden did something that's so effective that he looks really stupid.
Does this tell us anything about market behavior in general?
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Recommended for the title alone, though the content is right on as well. Jon Stewart had a great bit on the hype: Here and here.
April 30, 2009 1:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
Curious, no 'recommends' shown. ??
But thanks anyway!
April 30, 2009 2:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
I must have only thought I hit the button. There, now you have two! :O)
May 1, 2009 8:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
Post is Rec'd
And JEM, thanks for the links, that's funny stuff.
May 2, 2009 8:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
The current worry is not that this flu is inherently higher mortality but that by being non-standard it is less predictable in its behavior. Will it mutate again, will it become more virulent?
If the country of origin under-reports cases at first, and only shows up on the radar with deaths, they are over-represented, making it look higher mortality than actual.
April 30, 2009 1:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, and it could be that this flu was around before March 28, what I believe is the current official "first sighting" date. It could have been not noticed in ordinary and relatively endemic flu conditions.
BTW -- Is the connection of the serious closing remark to market behavior in general obvious or opaque? I wondered whether I should flesh out a context for that...
April 30, 2009 2:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think I get it, but expansion would be welcome.
April 30, 2009 5:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
Markets in general can be viewed from the point of view of individual investors, or from the point of view of something like macroeconomics. We see pandemics in the market, bubbles on the way up, panic selling on the way down.
Thing is, what seems rational for the individual can be problematic for the market as a whole (how does the market buy low and sell high?), and vice versa. In fact, there is a point at which the micro and macro are as contradictory as it can get (paradox or outright contradiction). Markets, as per Soros, embody Reflexivity and Fallibility. So do many social phenomena such as travel to Mexico and questions of disease vectors and transmission.
What that article discussed fits very well with my view of markets, and my recent blog on SIVs (virus or investment vehicle) relates directly to this.
April 30, 2009 10:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Maybe read this: http://www.cdc.gov/media/transcripts/2009/t090423.htm?s_cid=tw_epr_51
April 30, 2009 2:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Too long and dull for my tired brain. Can you cite something specific?
April 30, 2009 2:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Part of the confusion comes from the difference between contagiousness (how easily it spreads) and virulence (how likely it will kill once contracted). A deadly pandemic bug has to have both. Right now, there's some question as to whether the current N1H1 virus has either property.
Joe isn't wrong on this one, the commercial airline industry be damned (they need filter the breathing air that circulates inside planes). But the emphasis needs to be more on discouraging the use of airplanes and subways and buses by people who think they so little as MIGHT HAVE the bug, more than restrict the movement of healthy people.
However, our culture does not offer sufficient support to those under pressure to go out in public (to work, shop, learn, etc.). Quite the opposite: there's a whole line of OTC meds designed to hide the fact of one's contagious state.
April 30, 2009 3:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Joe isn't wrong "
Is clumsy right or just not wrong? I didn't set out to write a serious blog, but I do think he didn't qualify his remarks at all well. As the last ** part says in the linked article, there is a sort of justification for overstatement. I think Biden overdid the overdoing, if I may.
April 30, 2009 4:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
"So no US deaths except for an ill-legal immigrant? Why aren't we experiencing Mexico's morbidity and mortality"
The discrepancy may be due to a high number of unreported non-fatal Mexican cases. Right now is Mexico's peak flu season, and only a fraction (perhaps a tiny fraction) of all its flu cases get typed via lab testing. If that may-be is true, then the bug's virulence (fatality rate) is lower -- perhaps more like the range of a normal bug. Meanwhile, there may be a much higher rate of testing done in other countries, because: 1) they have been warned in advance; 2) they have more resource$; and so 3) they're picking up most of the non-lethal cases.
Cutesy pun, BTW.
April 30, 2009 4:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thx. It was aimed at the rabble rousers who tried to make this medical issue into a Cause re illegal immigration.
April 30, 2009 5:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think it's a lesson in how we respond to new diseases. Sure the media hype is ridiculous but the same can't be said about the world wide public health response (I don't count killing all the pigs in Egypt a public health response). As someone said, new diseases don't put a sign on a person's head so that we get a warning with the index case. By the time you know it's a new disease, it has long since spread. So how do we respond? It was not unreasonable for there to be extra caution. If we can reduce the spread of the disease, we have a greater ability to handle the serious cases. If we can reduce the spread of the disease as the flu seasons ends, we may buy time to have a vaccine ready when the next flu season comes around. If this isn't a killer flu, the next one or the one after that may be. What we learn now will be important for stopping the next one. If you read up on the 1918 flu, it's easy to see that if a flu like that takes hold with the kind of death rate it had, we simply don't have the hospital beds and equipment to handle cases on that kind of scale. We need to learn lessons now, so we're prepared to react with the most efficient public health response.
May 1, 2009 7:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's fair enough but my update was meant to consider the larger questions of Global Awareness and the spread of "information" as a kind of epidemic itself. We are now so extremely sensitive in some ways to any little perturbation, and news travels so fast (it travels instantly at one level, but it percolates into the global awareness pretty fast due to mass media).
We have a state, Wisconsin, going to Emergency status. http://www.madison.com/wsj/topstories/449374 But look at the article -- "14 probable cases of swine flu ... the danger lies in the potential of the virus to kill more than regular flu does."
I had not even heard of any cases there until today, and I'm hearing other reports that the data are challenging the notion that this virus is all that different or all that dangerous. That kind of contrast is a key part of my point.
When news travels fast, people tend to over-react to bits and pieces. The possible becomes the probable becomes the allegedly actual becomes the hysterical... like the game of telephone but not audio selection rather conceptual or notional selection.
The swine flu meme strikes me as a good basis for study in meme-related epidemiology.
May 2, 2009 1:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree about the message and that component should be part of the overall public health effort. We're pretty much experimenting in a global public health effort here. They might reconsider using the word "emergency" because people may misinterpret the term.
They could not know immediately how deadly the virus is. I don't think they'd even started analyzing it till mid-April and I think you have to get down to the real nitty gritty of its genetics to have an idea of how deadly it might be so they had to be cautious.
People overreact to things that are very unlikely to kill them like terrorism and they underreact to more realistic threats. So only one toddler died so far in the US. We don't know how many won't die because we reacted quickly. Even if the virus isn't that deadly in a large population of infected people there would be a considerable number of deaths. When I think of the inconvenience, harassment, and invasion of privacy that we've suffered under the panic over terrorism, it seems to me a little public overreaction on the public health front is nothing and will almost surely save more lives than the trillions we've wasted on war.
Plus, we'll learn from this and we'll do it better next time (unless we turn our public and private health over to big insurance and big pharma).
And why aren't we manufacturing flu vaccine in this country!! Isn't it a national security threat to have important components of vaccines only available in China? What's the matter with our priorities!
May 2, 2009 11:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
Also, if you were in a large hospital today you'd see posters on flu, handouts about flu, communication to all hospital employees in various formats about symptoms, recommended treatment, when and how to isolate patients, reminders about best practices, links to the correct information from the CDC and state public health officials. What you see on TV is the goofballs on cable news but there is much larger, more focused, and more rational effort out there to educate health care providers in real time about a new disease and the efforts they should take to both treat it and contain it.
May 2, 2009 11:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
Just a couple of replies here:
"People overreact to things that are very unlikely to kill them like terrorism and they underreact to more realistic threats."
That speaks to the nature of risk, that it involves probabilities AND costs (whether perceived or real). But I think that people aren't really that way, rather the government can be seen to overreact where ordinary people tend to ignore some risks (Official Terror Threat Levels?). That is, there is also the distinction of individual risk vs. public risk (mentioned in the "serious" ** part of the original blog and the linked article).
And of course if going to the emergency room is cheap or free, people will abuse that privilege to some extent almost on a whim (some hospitals overloaded by "flu" patients when maybe 90%+ of them aren't even close to being at emergency status). And that's another 'cost' factor, the cost of taking perhaps unnecessary action vs. the cost of riding it out longer.
So while there may be some truth in what you say, I wanted to reply with my views.
May 2, 2009 2:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Get your flu on!
May 2, 2009 8:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
That flu right on past me!
May 2, 2009 2:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
You might enjoy the reference
http://www.mnftiu.cc/category/gywo/war81/
May 2, 2009 6:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks! Clarified and amused...
May 2, 2009 6:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
I’m replying because I have nothing else to do since I’m out of work for a couple of weeks by order of the CDC. Funny thing, though, according to the CDC there are no confirmed cases of this flu for hundreds of miles. Hmmm. Could it be that they do not concede that one has the flu until it is absolutely confirmed by unequivocal tests?
Health officials have played this down if anything. The CDC was warned by a monitoring group of the Mexican outbreak a month ago, and officials have been doing everything to keep everyone calm including playing down the numbers.
Viruses usually mutate into a form that infects one person or a few, and then gets transmitted human to human, spreading exponentially. If this flu is responsible for all of the deaths thought in Mexico it’s possible that the strain is different from the one that has traveled to other countries. It's possible that the virus going around in the US does not have the genetic mutation of the one that killed the infant.
No one knows how virulent this strain of flu will be though it looks to be mild. But that can change. This is likely to cycle around the world and flare up with a vengeance in the fall and winter. In circulating, the flu can pick up other gene mutations and become more lethal. It may just fade out, but who knows?
As in any possible emergency, prepare for the worst and hope for the best. Until more is known, prophylactic measures make sense. Some people were said to be overreacting to Katrina. Many stayed in N.O. because they had no choice, but many ignored the warnings. Yes, there are many things that can kill us; lightning and terrorism are not likely to do that. But even the typical flu is enough of a threat that $billions are spent in doctor visits, missed work and getting vaccinations. I'm not going to hesitate getting a flu vaccination because I might get run over on the way to get it.
We should take every precaution to contain the spread of this bug. This could eventually become a lethal pandemic or it may be a typical flu. Let’s not panic, but let’s take common sense precautions and try to contain it as best we can. (but I agree, nice title of post)
May 2, 2009 3:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Don! Should I send food and alcohol?!!
(worried chicken)
May 2, 2009 4:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks, Bwak, but no; I've got cases of Spaghettios, Top Raman noodles and RC Colas in my survival shelter. Also, plenty of booze (for medicinal purposes, of course).
Seriously though, it would be nice if I could fly up to see my granddaughter (just turned one), but it's kind of a catch-22. I can't as a precaution, though I have the time off as a precaution.
May 2, 2009 4:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
=(
(hugs Don)
I'm not scared of HiNis
May 2, 2009 5:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
You're too good, bwak. I ain't scared of no ghost flus either, but I'm scared as hell of my daughter-in-law when it comes to her child!
May 2, 2009 5:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
That is because you are a very, very, very, VERY wise man
=D
May 2, 2009 6:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
"(but I agree, nice title of post)"
Thanks, but why the "but"? Did you skip the serious side referenced re Biden and '**'?
"We should take every precaution "
I think we should take every NECESSARY precaution, but definining necessity is ironically almost necessarily impossible globally! Taking unnecessary precautions might be fine for some but not for others.
May 2, 2009 5:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mine is not a big "but" so to speak, eds ("and" would've worked too). Of course, only necessary precautions are, um, necessary, and I haven't seen any real overreaction here, aside from some individuals and the sometimes breathless newscasts.
I do not think closing of schools, for example, as Ft. Worth did, was an overreaction. Many people did, but schools are incubators. Given the alleged flu deaths in Mexico and thousands coming down with flu symptoms in this state, all schools should probably have been closed, and sooner. We still know little about this virus, but we knew very, very little two days ago.
But- I mean, And you're point about one place having a differing consensus on threat levels from another is well taken. We have to have a WHO type organization, though, the way everything moves in this world. Yes, it's looking like we got lucky this time, but I live too near the coast not to board up if a hurricane is possibly heading this way.
May 2, 2009 5:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
"I haven't seen any real overreaction here"
I don't know the details but Wisconsin declared a state of emergency over this. The reports I saw did not nearly make that necessary, but maybe the reports were deficient. And as the article about Biden notes, sometimes an apparently foolish overreaction is what is needed to prevent a minor problem from getting out of hand.
Thanks for commenting!
May 2, 2009 6:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Who knew there were pigs in Egypt?
May 2, 2009 9:00 PM | Reply | Permalink