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Running the Numbers on a US Pandemic
Lucas123 writes "A U.S. pandemic would exhaust antiviral medications, reduce basic food supplies, put ATMs out of service, shut down call centers, increase gas prices and up health insurance claims by 20%, according a test project developed by financial service firms. The pandemic paper planning scenario is used by 3,000 banks, insurance companies and security firms in preparing for disasters. The financial services groups are now sharing the pandemic flu exercise information, and all the scenarios are available for download."
Expect this to be shut down fairly quickly as it is a private directory and marked as "Not for public release"
:-)
That said, essentially, what we have is an issue of upkeep. This world does not run itself and requires input to prevent things from running down, so it been said before, but amateurs discuss things such as strategy, but the experts discuss logistics. And it is logistics that need to be organized in times of planning and scenarios run to discover where the logistical chain breaks down. These weak links in the chain are those areas that need attention and typically those are the links that rely upon people to maintain the flow of information/goods/support.
The interesting thing to me is that they appear to have modeled this pandemic spread as originating in Lagos, Nigeria which would be a relatively slow introduction or pathogenic spread into the rest of the world until it hits an area like Beijing, Calcutta or any other rapidly growing supermetropolis where you have hordes of people living in less than ideal conditions right next to others who travel extensively throughout the developed world. Their exercise appears to miss China and Indonesia entirely which could if modeled in lead to much more rapid spread, involving potentially many more people or even invoke or enhance infective "ringing" where waves of infection or reinfection propegate through various large populations.
P.S. exercises like this are important to release to the public as most folks simply do not have any guidance or have given any thought to preparing for such a possibility. What are you going to do when the zombies show up at your door?
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I would expect that a pandemic would place a larger burden on the system than that. Or do they expect that so many of us will just simply die that it will average out to only a 20% increase in claims?
Of course the hyper-cynical side of me wants to point out that claims for dead people are seldom paid out, so I could see that as an explanation for the increase being at only 20%.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
U.S. pandemic. Which idiot came up with that phrase ?
There is no such thing as a US pandemic, there is only a pandemic.
Well, one thing that I'm going to do is to get some decent masks. They showed a couple on a news report last night, related to the San Diego fires. Apparently the worst soot particles as the smallest, as these are so small that they not only go through most masks, but they also travel the farthest.
So, does anyone know what are the best masks to use during an actual Pandemic? And will these indeed be effective?
Well only if you don't count the black death, which killed 30-60% of the population of Europe, or the Small Pox pandemic which possibly killed upwards of 70% of Native Americans and advanced faster and was more ruthless than the conquering European armies.
A massive reduction of human population would reduce the stress on:
- fresh water reserves
- dwindling oil supplies
- food crops already threatened by global warming
- natural resources such as forests
so it's not all bad.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
What is already available, will likely not be effective against a pandemic because the reason the flu is pandemic, is because it is able to bypass all available methods of treatment/prevention.
That's just wrong. Flu pandemics don't happen because of vaccines working or not working. Flu pandemics started before vaccines existed and didn't become any less frequent after their creation. In fact, they've only appear to be getting more common because of easier access to the world (flight) and increasing overcrowding in urban areas.
Flu pandemics happen because a particularly virulent strain of the flu evolves. Sometimes it's the evolution of an existing human-infectious strain (like the H1N1 subtype that caused the Spanish Flu pandemic from 1918-1920) or from crossing over from animals (like the avian H2N2 subtype caused the Asian Flu pandemic in '57). The former happened before flu vaccines existed. The latter, after flu vaccines.
Granted, coming up with a vaccine for a pandemic strain would be helpful, but it's unlikely to happen in time because they tend to spread faster than normal flu strains (because of their increased virulence). I don't want to get into the whole thing about how flu strains are chosen for a vaccine and how vaccines works, but suffice it to say, vaccines are usually for several strains that already exist and are predicted to be the most likely to be widely spread, but because it takes so long to incubate the vaccine, the flu must be relatively slow-spreading.
Pandemic influenza strains, on the other hand, spread very quickly. Far too quickly for a vaccine to be created in time. We worried about the H5N1 avian variant because it was very deadly. We can't start creating a vaccine for it until it has evolved into a variant that is easily spread from human to human. Well, that's not entirely true. We could, but it probably wouldn't be effective against the easily spread variant. The vast majority of cases in people (if not all) of H5N1 were from direct contact with infected animals, but it was not easily spread. Had it evolved into an easily spread form (and it still could), then it would very likely become a pandemic influenza variant.