H1N1 is really scary.
Posted by Nathaniel.
I don’t know that there’s much more to say about it than that.. The 1918 flu was also also a H1N1 strain and predominantly killed people our age by making our immune systems overwork themselves. Young kids, old people, and people with weak immune systems all made it through. The healthy young adults were the ones who died.
The good news though is that this isn’t a H5N1 avian flu. Only a few people have ever been infected with it but the fatality rate is between 60 and 100%.
November 1st, 2009 at 5:08 pm Using
I maybe don’t give it enough credit. It seems to have made its dastardly sweep through campus here already, and I didn’t catch it. Still some cases around now, I suppose, but the health center isn’t swamped anymore. Maybe I had a “get out of flu free” card, though, because I already had a sinus infection, and so my immune system was already compromised, instead of being a “young healthy adult”. It also helps that I’m not teaching freshmen this semester, and I hand-sanitized religiously after every excursion into the health center (they also seemed to be sending the flu cases to a different waiting area than everyone else, thank god) and washed up before eating. There is the matter of my lingering cough, but I think that’s just allergies.
November 1st, 2009 at 11:19 pm Using
10% of my class was out sick last Thursday so it’s hitting hard here too. We’ve had to do all sorts of flu preparedness stuff from wiping down tables to revising syllabi to take out requirements that students see the doctor for an excuse if they’re sick. There’s worry that marginally sick people who really should be staying hom will overwhelm doctor’s offices and get in the way of care for people who actually need it. I think health centers really are trying to separate flu people from normal-sick people too. Your different waiting areas are probably to do exactly that. President Obama’s decree a week ago made it possible for hospitals to set up separate ERs.
It is supposed to work on a 6 to 7 week infection cycle, so there should be waves of it coming through every month and a half or so. That puts the next wave right about Christmastime?
Anyway, hopefully this will all be something that we laugh about in a year or two, “remember how scared people were about H1N1? we really blew that out of proportion” but it does have huge possibilities of being something very bad.
November 2nd, 2009 at 7:49 pm Using
If that’s the case, Holly, you got pretty lucky – good to have the campus exposed to the first/early-season strain as opposed to a December-January version. My guess is that there’s going to be a nasty batch that comes back to college campuses in early January, and has a big party.
But yeah, somehow I wasn’t very worried about “the sars” but h1n1 is pretty scary. dunno.
November 4th, 2009 at 1:50 pm Using
I never really get the “regular” flu – have NEVER gotten a flu shot-, so I find it hard to get too worried. But I still do the hand-washing or sanitizer routines anyway. Staying away from all the contagious undergrads will be hard though in January, when we’re all at the basketball games…ick. I also hope to switch teaching assignments, which would put me back in contact with the population at large (astro 101) too. Meh. Maybe I should consider the shot, after all. Still won’t get the “regular” shot though.
November 4th, 2009 at 2:07 pm Using
Flu is actually pretty amazing, we don’t think about how many people die of it every year, but the mortality rate is actually pretty high, something like 0.1%. So, of 1000 people who get the regular flu, 1 person dies. Typically that dead person is either old or young or has some other medical problem, but it amounts to thousands of dead people a year. Dead people who wouldn’t be dead if they got a flu shot. (Actually though, it turns out that flu shots don’t tend to reduce mortality in the elderly. They do work for kids though.) It’s currently looking like the mortality rate from H1N1 is higher than the seasonal flu, but it’s really hard to say exactly how high. Of people sick enough to go to the hospital, 18% die. But not that many people end up being sick enough to go to the hospital.
Anyway, the conclusion is that getting every flu shot you can get might not be a bad idea. Flu is a dangerous thing with non-zero chances of mortality for you. If nothing else, I’d rather be well than have to take 3 or 4 days of feeling like crap.