I was wrong.
Yesterday, the school was at a point of orgasm because there were wild rumors running around that the school was going to get cancelled for an extended period of time because of swine flu. Apparently, all the rest of the egypt schools had been closed for a week to slow the spread of swine flu. The idea being that if enough people get it, thats bad, and it'll spread very quickly.
Egypt is trying to buy some more time so they can save up for some vaccinations, or at least some anti-viral drugs. So by shutting down schools, they can prevent the virus from gaining any momentum or traction and stave off a widespread pandemic.
In Theory.
Of course, the Egyptian government has killed all the pigs in Egypt. This is, in my personal opinion (shared by many) just a way to piss of the Coptic Christians that live in Cairo (of which there are many, and they all eat pork). The idea is... how could we, the muslim egyptian governement, piss off the christians? Humm.... Well, they like pig, and we don't. Voila!
The number of deaths due to swine flu is sitting near 3,000 atm.
It is well documented that more people die from the regular flu then swine flu, by large amounts. Most of these deaths in fact are not even because of swine flu. In the majority of these cases the victim usually had a compromised immune system already. In fact this article by the CDC, it states that on average, about 36,000 people die every year from the regular flu, 10 times as many as have died from swine flu.
It is also important to note that even though there have been 3,000 deaths due to swine flu, that is out of near 300,000 documented cases, and of course, the real number could be much higher. That is a 1 in 100 chance of death.
To put that in comparison... Even if you GET swine flu, your chance of death currently sits at about even with BASE Jumping or Deep Sea Fishing. I'm not saying thats very good, in fact thats pretty dangerous, but if you look at your lifetime odds of dying from other things, this is pretty low.
And these numbers include the people who don't even GET the them, for example, for Americans, your chance of dying from Cancer is 1 in 7, even though not everyone gets cancer.
Chance of dying of heart failure is 1 in 5, 1 in 27 for a stroke, and 1 in 100 for motor vehicle crashes.
This puts it at about twice as deadly as the measles, but half as deadly as the Bubonic Plaugue. Of course these are all without medication.
Anyways, the point is that I'm not at school because of this, and somehow in a city of 14 million with hundreds of people on subways every day, somehow this will slow the spread. Sure...
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