Several SurvivalBlog readers mentioned an article that ran recently in the New York Times: U.S. Issues Guidelines in Case of Flu Pandemic. The article begins: “Cities should close schools for up to three months in the event of a severe flu outbreak, ball games and movies should be canceled and working hours staggered so subways and buses are less crowded, the federal government advised today in issuing new pandemic flu guidelines to states and cities.
Health officials acknowledged that such measures would hugely disrupt public life, but they argued that these measure would buy the time needed to produce vaccines and would save lives because flu viruses attack in waves lasting about two months.
“We have to be prepared for a Category 5 pandemic,” said Dr. Martin Cetron, director of global migration and quarantine for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], in releasing the guidelines. “It’s not easy. The only thing that’s harder is facing the consequences. That will be intolerable.”
In an innovation, the new guidelines are modeled on the five levels of hurricanes, but ranked by lethality instead of wind speed. Category 1, which assumes 90,000 Americans would die, is equivalent to a bad year for seasonal flu, Glen Nowak, a CDC spokesman, said. (About 36,000 Americans die of flu in an average year.) Category 5, which assumes 1.8 million dead, is the equivalent of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. (That flu killed about 2 percent of those infected; the H5N1 flu now circulating in Asia has killed more than 50 percent but is not easily transmitted.)” [End quote.]
Given the lethality rate of H5N1, I think that the CDC officials are overly optimistic, almost to the point of being Pollyannas. They have understated the pandemic threat considerably. As I mentioned in my article Protecting Your Family From an Influenza Pandemic, the current strain of the H5N1 virus has a 58% lethality rate for humans. If a new easily transmissible strain emerges, and that strain has the same lethality, imagine this: It could infect 20% of the population, and then kill 58% of those that are infected. In a nation of 300 million that equates to 34.8 million deaths. In fact, the death rate could be even higher. Why? In the recent Asian outbreaks, we have witnessed aggressive hospitalized treatment for all of those that were infected–complete with 24-hour nursing, artificial ventilation, broad spectrum antibiotics (for bacterial co-infections), oxygen therapy, I.V. fluids, experimental anti-virals, the whole works. But in a major pandemic there would not be enough hospital beds for even small percentage of the flu patients. There are roughly 947,000 staffed hospital beds in the U.S. (including prison hospitals) and about 65% of standard beds and 85% in critical care unit beds are filled on any given day. (Some suggest that there is a bed shortage, even in the present day.) And what about hospital ventilators? Forget it! In the U.S. there are “about 105,000 ventilators, and even during a regular flu season, about 100,000 [of them] are in use.“
So what is the bottom line? To be more realistic in assessing worst case situations, the CDC needs to add at least a couple more category numbers (i.e. Category 6 and Category 7.) In my estimation the CDC has publicly underestimated the pandemic threat, to avoid widespread panic.
The latest news is that H5N1 has been found in farm poultry in England. It is just a matter of time before it makes its way into U.S. poultry flocks. But H5N1 is not in itself a big public health threat. It is the potential mutated variety “HX” that is the real threat. But for now, H5N1 has circled the globe and may become endemic. Everywhere that it exists, there is the chance that a viable “H2H” strain could emerge. When that happens, watch out!
Are you ready to self-quarantine your entire family to avoid exposure? If not, then you’d better get on the phone to a food storage vendor (there are several very reputable ones that are SurvivalBlog advertisers) and order an honest six month supply of food for your family. Do it NOW, because if you wait until after a flu outbreak, then it will be too late. The supermarket shelves will swept bare in less than 24 hours, nationwide. Human nature dictates that this will happen. That is what people always do in emergencies. We just haven’t yet seen it happen from coast to coast.