The Flu epidemic may blow out in the Fall, but we now have the Internet
It is interesting to see that the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918 which killed from 3% to 5% of the population of Berlin, Paris, New York started slowly in the Spring and Summer and then went wild in the Fall killing most of its victims then. Flu spreads by proximity and physical contact. In the Fall schools start, people go indoors, and the chances of contact greatly increase. But what´s different now is not the medicine itself that has advanced very little against viruses but that we have the Internet. If the current Flu epidemic killed over say 300 people in Spain I would probably tell people at Fon to work at home over the Internet. I would not ask people to risk their lives to work at Fon. I would not send my children to school either and would ask them to study over the Internet. I would establish a plan to limit contact with the outside world, would stop traveling and would wait. I see Skype type products usage exploding if the Pandemic happens. I just hope it goes away though. News from Mexico were encouraging this weekend.
The majority of deaths came in the Fall
graph via www.investorconundrum.com.
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Posted on General | 11:15 am
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Posted by Leonardo - May 4, 2009 12:40 pm - #
Sounds like a scifi dystopia movie plot.
Maybe reality and sci-fi are approaching eachother lately.
Posted by fluFON - May 4, 2009 1:34 pm - #
so how FON can profit from virus ?? maybe you are wired by conficker. one is biological the other is electronics. so i guess you will develop fluFON very rapidly…..
Posted by Nemo - May 4, 2009 9:53 pm - #
Just a little poing from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic
“Although the first cases of the disease were registered in the continental US and the rest of Europe long before getting to Spain, the 1918 Flu received its nickname “Spanish Flu” because Spain, a neutral country in WWI, had no special censorship for news against the disease and its consequences. Hence the most reliable news came from Spain, giving the false impression that Spain was the most -if not the only- affected zone.”
This is a clear case of “shooting the messenger”. Just as we do not call the current Flu epidemic “mexican flu” to be politically correct and avoid “guilty countries” and feed xenophobia, we can also be “historically backwards correct”