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Originally Posted by 13Sandals  Please don't scare yourself (and others) by jumping to a .5% death rate conclusion based on the 'reported cases' numbers. No one can possibly guess at how many have come in contact with the swine flu and recovered without incidence.
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First of all, I'm not scared. Anyone who is scared is either being irrational or not paying enough attention. I'm neither scared of vaccines, nor am I scared of the flu. I refuse, however, to agree to either blow it off or become obsessed. And it is only appropriate to correct the mathematical error committed by the PP who stated a 0.005% death rate based on the available numbers.
I immediately acknowledged (above) that this is not a reliable death rate due to the way in which the numbers are reported and noted that no official "death rate" has been published because it cannot be determined based on the available data. However, stating it is a "0.005%" death rate based on those numbers is simply a mathematical error, and I pointed that out. You cannot have it both ways (general you) by saying "It's only 0.005% based on the #s! No big deal!" and also say "It's not 0.5% because you can't use those #s!" The error required correction/clarification.
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Originally Posted by mommysarah5 I wonder how many of that .05% were already sick with something else, immune compromised, or otherwise unhealthy (poor weight, bad nutrition, unsanitary living conditions, etc) When they throw the death rate out there I always want to know, WHICH people. Even if it WAS .05% ALL healthy people I wouldn't be interested in the vaccine, but I have a feeling that .05% wasn't a majority of people in their best possible health to begin with.
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According to what I have read from the CDC, WHO, and state health agencies, approximately 50% of the fatalities had other health conditions that may have contributed to their deaths. Some of those conditions include (not at the same time) pregnancy and asthma.
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Originally Posted by TanyaS .005%....not .05%  |
No, 0.5%. Since there is so much confusion, here is how you calculate the "death rate" from the reported numbers quoted earlier in this thread:
211 / 37,246 = 0.005665 x 100 = 0.5665% =~ 0.57%
Technically if using one digit we should be rounding up to 0.6%, but I didn't bother to do that.
ETA: There have been some comments from health authorities that there may have been as many as 1 million H1N1 infections in the United States. If that is the case, and if every single H1N1-related death was reported in the 211 accounted for, the death rate would be 0.02%. You can probably pretty safely say that the death rate is somewhere between 0.02% and 0.6%, for whatever good that may do.
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