Flu and laughter

This week we have flu. More to the point Lois has flu and I’m sitting here hoping I don’t. I had my flu vaccine shot on Saturday, but of course that is for last year’ flu, not the new one.

Lois and I spent the last week teaching, fifty students all week in a room that wasn’t ventilated very well. The university has some sort of system where all the ventilation is controlled from some central point, which of course takes a couple of days to track down. Even when we talked to the guy, nothing seemed to change much. Has anyone in the control centre ever sat though a whole morning of teaching in a stuffy room I wonder? Not very likely, I guess. I suppose it might be possible to have some sort of device that measures how often the air changes but one way or another I think Lois must have got the flu from someone in that room.

Lois tried out the online system run by the department of health so you can diagnose swine flu yourself. If the computer thinks you have swine flu then it gives you an ID number, and then you send someone else to collect the Tamiflu. So even if she doesn’t have swine flu, she at least has computer flu. Which ever it is, it comes with a cough and fever and feeling rotten.

This computer system is sensible of course; if all the people with the flu turned up to collect the supplies then it would certainly put the staff at greater risk. On top of that anyone with a wrong diagnosis who came to collect the supplies would probably get the flu anyway from the other people who were collecting. Making the diagnosis by wire and sending a friend must reduce spread to some extent. As it was when I collected the stuff for Lois I was the only one there.

Fortunately the new Terry Pratchett novel came out this week so a week sitting at home is less of a pain. For many years now I’ve been buying Pratchett’s as soon as them come out, plus going to book signings as well.

This one, Unseen Academicals, is as good as all the rest. Several new characters appear as well as a few familiar ones. This book is about football, sort of. A particular disc world kind of football, but I’m sure it draws on a lot of the history of the game in real life too.

Like all Terry Pratchett novels it draws on a deep understanding of humanity, but what he does is to make the messages a little lighter by giving some of the characteristics to dwarfs and trolls, or other sundry life forms. How we relate to strangers and how we cope with our deepest fears, is there in all his books, but it’s not heavy. Pratchett is very funny too; this new one is a tough book to read on a bus, because you are almost bound to laugh out loud at some point - actually at a lot of points.

I’m probably a little weird at the moment, not exactly feverish but something is operating a bit differently, either fighting off Lois’s virus (old people, like me, are supposed to have some immunity to it) or maybe just dealing with having the vaccine. Stuff like that makes me more emotional, when I’m sufficiently ill that all I can do is read in bed I find books make me cry a lot. Even the ones I laugh at a lot make me cry as well. I know I’m not really ill this time because Unseen Academicals just made me laugh and laugh.

Swine Flu

I've been reading some of the posts to the BBC about Swine Flu. The predictability is awesome, mostly along the lines that this is a media hype.

I looked at the figures from CDC in the USA. As of today just over 13,000 cases and 27 people have died, in other words about 1 death in 500 cases. At the moment in the UK, as I understand it, we are still trying to contain Swine Flu. That means each time there is a case then all the possible contacts are traced, and given antiviral drugs. Classes or whole schools are closed, people sent home from work, whatever it takes to try and stop each case giving it to lots more people. So far this has kept the numbers down to 800 cases.

It also means that all these cases are going into hospital as needed and no doubt getting the best possible treatment. It also helps that it's summer, a time when Flu viruses don't usually spread in the UK.

If the numbers increase faster then it won't be possible to contain it because there will be just too many contacts to trace, and not enough health workers to do it.

You might think contact tracing is easy, but for Flu it is made more difficult because the incubation period is short, and new cases are often infectious before they have symptoms. Even if everyone is being very responsible (how likely is that?) and not going out when they have symptoms, they may still give it to lots of others before they know that they have it. Plus of course there will be very mild cases who don't even realise that they have flu, and they can still spread it.

Make a list of everyone that you met three days ago and then see if you can find them all in the next two days, and see if you can find all the people that they met in two more days, and all the people that they met in two more. You get the idea?

Once it gets out of hand, in other words when it is spreading faster than the health workers can keep up with it then we will move to the next stage of the strategy. I think what is supposed to happen then is that if you think you have symptoms then there will be a number to phone in order to collect your antiviral pills. You'll probably have to send someone to collect them and while they are there they might as well get some for themselves because they will catch it off you when they bring you the pills. If you don't start taking the pills within about a day of symptoms starting then they don't work as well, so make sure you have your pill collecting volunteer handy.

If we are lucky, and sunshine still works then we might well contain it until next autumn, let's hope so. Once it gets out of hand then probably 20% of the population will get it, possibly more, which is about 10,000,000 cases and if 1 in 500 die then that's 20,000 deaths. Of course if it gets to that, then probably they won't all be treated as well, and those who are already ill may find it harder to avoid because there will be so much more virus circulating, so we might have more than 20,000 deaths.

On average there are just under 10,000 deaths from all causes each week in the UK; so a mild flu outbreak which adds 20,000 deaths over a 10 week period will increase deaths by about 2000 per week, a 20% increase. At that rate the funeral service should cope and we won't have bodies in freezer vans waiting to be cremated or burried or need to have funeral pyres like the foot and mouth outbreak. It wouldn't take much more than that to cause a problem, the funeral market is pretty stable so there is not a lot of competition and over capacity. If the virus got a bit more lethal and particularly if it killed younger people who were not about to die anyway, then queues to be burried will develop, and once they get behind then they will get more and more behind over the period of the epidemic. Well I suppose we could cremate people two at a time or have church services in the middle of then night (so long as the preacher doesn't have flu).

So, to sum up, for all those cynics saying it's all media hype, I suggest that they get out there and catch it as quick as they can. If they are right, and it's mild then they will soon be immune, and able to collect pills for everyone else, and if they are unlucky and die, at least they won't have to queue for a funeral.