# 1889
Four days ago wire services carried a story about Indonesia developing a pandemic plan and holding an exercise on the island of Bali. Heru Setijanto, head of surveillance and monitoring at the national commission for bird flu control, was quoted as saying :
In the case of a pandemic, an estimated 5 million Indonesians could be infected with the virus, he said, adding that of those infected, between 5 and 10% would die.
When I ran this story in my blog I questioned the above statement, since it suggests an attack rate at least 1/10th of what most nations are expecting.
I wondered at the time if it wasn't either a misstatement or a misprint. Apparently it was.
Today, in advance of a major pandemic exercise to be held next week on Bali, officials are using a far more realistic number; 65 million people infected, or a 13 fold increase over the number used earlier this week.
Using their own numbers, of a 5%-10% fatality rate, they could expect between 3.2 and 6.5 million deaths.
Of course, the 30% attack rate and the 5%-10% fatality rate are just educated guesses, based on the 1918 pandemic. Essentially scientists are basing their predictions on a dataset of one.
There are no guarantees that the next pandemic will act as predicted. It could easily have a greater or lesser impact than the Spanish Flu. We won't know until it's over, and the numbers are tallied.
65m Indonesians at risk if bird flu mutates
JAKARTA - MORE than 60 million Indonesians could be infected with deadly bird flu if the virus mutates into a form transmissible between humans, an official said on Friday.
Indonesia is the country worst hit by bird flu, with 107 people known to have died from the disease, 13 of them this year.
Experts fear the virus, which is usually spread from birds to humans, could mutate into a form easily transmissible between people, sparking a deadly global pandemic.
'Some 65 million people or 30 per cent of the country's population will be infected if a bird flu pandemic strikes Indonesia,' Bayu Krisnamurthi, head of the national committee for control of avian influenza told reporters.
He said the estimated figure was based on the number of fatalities from flu pandemics last century.
