And the Survey Says . . . .
#191
Survey: In flu pandemic, staying home raises paycheck, care
WASHINGTON (AP) - Americans are concerned about how they'd cope if they needed to stay home to ride out a super-strain flu pandemic. A Harvard University poll says one in four adults says there is no one to care for them at home if they got sick. And one in four say they could not afford to miss work for even a week.
Harvard health policy specialist Robert Blendon says if you want to contain the flu, "you have to make it livable for people" to comply with infection-control steps or an epidemic's going "to get much more severe."
Some 94 percent said they would stay home for seven to ten days if they had pandemic flu. And 85 percent would do so if a household member were sick.
http://tinyurl.com/yfdqct
What is most startling about the responses to this Harvard poll is not that 1 in 4 people have no caregivers, or even that 85 percent would stay home to take care of a sick household member.
No, what struck me was the response that 94% would take 7 to 10 days off from work if they got the avian flu.
Obviously, 94% of the population has no conception of the effects of this influenza. Or, at least the folks at Harvard, who designed the questions for this little social experiment.
Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, people are still thinking of this as if it were an ordinary flu. Take some Tylenol, sip chicken soup, and stay in bed for a week. After about 10 days, you’ll be ready to go back to work. Yeah, right.
Unless something dramatic happens to reduce the mortality and morbidity of this virus when (and if) it goes pandemic, a week in bed watching reruns on TV is not the likely outcome. To date, 60% of those who have contracted it have died. On average, the 40% who have survived required 30 days in the hospital, with IV’s, antivirals, antibiotics, oxygen, and yes, even ventilators.
This is not your father’s influenza.
Of course, the American people can be forgiven this misconception. After all, our government has done just about everything it can to reassure us that it won’t be so bad. They continue to talk of a 2% mortality rate, despite the 60% death rate to date. Only recently have a few bold scientists come forth and suggested that a 35% mortality rate was more likely.
If these high mortality rates are likely, why then does our government continue to plan for a 2% fatality rate? Why are people being told to stay home and ride out the illness, when the government knows that most will need advanced medical care? Why do we continue to hear of a 35% absenteeism rate from work, when all indications are that it may well be double that?
Simply because, those are the worst-case numbers the government feels it can deal with.
There is simply no contingency plan for a severe pandemic. Anything worse than the federal assumptions is unmanageable, and therefore it is ignored. They are planning for what they can handle, and praying it isn’t any worse.
My critique here is not that the government can’t handle 30 million sick people simultaneously, or a CFR (Case Fatality Ratio) of 35%. And it certainly isn’t that the government can’t deal with a 70% absenteeism rate. After all, these are, by their very nature, unmanageable events. The government can’t magically make 30 million hospital beds appear. Some things simply can’t be done.
No, my critique is that the government, unwilling to admit their limitations, is willing to let 300 million Americans walk into this nightmare without telling them the truth. That they’d rather pray things aren’t that bad, than to warn the citizenry.
After all, it would provoke a large number of unpleasant questions they’d rather not deal with. It would be very messy. And with elections coming up, not the sort of thing they want people focused on.
So the Government continues to recommend a 2-week supply of food on hand. And frequent hand washing as our primary flu precaution. Not because they believe these things will be adequate, but because they simply can’t deal with reality.
