Pandemic Casualty Estimates Escalate in UK?
#230
Ok, so maybe the Sunday Mirror isn’t the London Times, and a blind attribution to an unnamed senior minister doesn’t carry the weight of an official announcement, but today’s story about a proposed Avian Flu drill in the UK will undoubtedly raise a few eyebrows at home and abroad.
Beginning next month, the UK will stage a multi-day bird flu pandemic drill, dubbed Operation "Winter Willow", that will involve multiple emergency services, town hall officials, and local police. Areas of the country, according to news reports, will be `sealed off by police’ in this exercise. The word `quarantined’ was not used, although one might easily surmise that is the intent.
According to reportage today in the Sunday Mirror: Government experts fear up to seven million Britons could die in a major outbreak. A senior minister said: "That is a worst case scenario. But we are overdue for a flu pandemic and when it arrives as many as one in four people could be affected."
It should be noted that 7 million deaths in the UK is a twenty-fold increase over the `prudent worst-case’ numbers widely reported for that nation last April.
Bird flu plan for 'mass graves'
Sunday, 2 April 2006
Plans for mass burials are being considered as part of Home Office preparations for a possible bird flu pandemic, reports the Sunday Times.
It cites a confidential report that says a "prudent worst case" assessment suggested 320,000 could die if the H5N1 virus mutated into a human form.
The document warns "there are likely to be substantially more deaths than can be managed within current timescales".
The Home Office said it did not respond to leaks but is making preparations.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4869224.stm
This article went on to discuss `secret’ government plans to handle 320,000 corpses, and indicated that delays of up to 17 weeks could be anticipated for burials. Less than a month ago, newspapers in the UK breathlessly reported that the number of body bags that might be required during a pandemic might reach as high as 3 million.
Today, if the reporting from the Mirror is to be believed, that supply could fall far short.
Accurate or not, the estimate of 7 million casualties in the UK is probably closer to reality than the 320,000 bandied about last April. Assuming a pandemic erupts, the real numbers will depend upon the attack rate, and the CFR (Case Fatality Ratio).
As stated before in this blog, the conventional wisdom that only 25% - 30% of the population may be affected by a novel pandemic virus may be horribly wrong. This oft quoted figure is based upon the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, and there is strong, though circumstantial evidence that at least a portion of the population back then already had immunity to the virus from a previous exposure in the mid to late 19th century.
The idea that 7 out of 10 of us might have some built in immunity to a pandemic is comforting, but not necessarily accurate. We won’t know about the attack rate, until it happens. To date, of those infected, roughly 60% have died, and distressingly, to date the virus has shown no sign of losing its lethality. Once again, we will have to wait and see what further mutations do to these numbers.
But even assuming the optimistic 25% attack rate and cutting the lethality of the virus in half, out of a population of 60 million, more than 4.5 million Brits could be expected to die. Should the virus retain its current mortality rate, that number soars to 9 million.
So far, I’ve seen no `official’ recognition of these higher estimates. While the home office, as stated in the BBC article, never comments on `leaks’, one hopes they are seriously considering the high end of the casualty estimates. If they are still planning on 320,000 casualties as a worst-case scenario, then they could be caught dreadfully unprepared.
The announcement of the Winter Willow drill is a good sign, however. It shows that the authorities are taking all of this seriously.
Let’s just hope they are taking it seriously enough.
