E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

July 15th has the right to consider itself smack dab in the middle of summer. High summer should be a time to relax - the fish are jumping. Instead, today's news is grimmer than day-old Eyewear . Depending on who you listen to, as reported by the BBC or The Guardian , death rates for previously healthy people are expected to amount to a) 25% of all cases or b) 20% of all cases. Worse, death rates are expected to be up to "1 in 200" of all who "seek medical advice from their doctor". That rate seems higher than the current death rate of 0.28 per million the UK is experiencing at the moment, until one considers that most people don't have swine flu (yet). This 1:200 death rate means 5,000 for every million cases. Given that the government is predicting that 20% of the UK will (at a minimum) contract the H1N1 virus, and even before assuming the virus may mutate, that means, at a conservative estimate, 10 million Britons will get the flu. That's 50,000 death...

Health Minister Burnham 's announcement of yesterday, that there is a doubling each week of swine flu cases in the UK, that the pandemic is now out of control, and that there is likely to be 100,000 new cases a day by the end of August, is not good news. There are 8,000 cases, roughly, in Britain as of this Friday. That means by start of August, there would be over 128,000. That would be a million and rising by September, and, if the current model holds, everyone in the UK, more or less, would be infected by November. This scenario is terrifying. People with low immune systems will die, and there are not enough respirators to keep a fraction of oncoming pneumonia cases alive. Ask your friends in health provision about how many oxygen tents would be required to keep people alive. Further, if large swathes of the total population are incapacitated, even for the 7 days or so that is required, civil society will bend if not break. A new etiquette, or some guidelines, need to be ...