Swine flu in Chile – stop the hype

May 22, 2009 by André

Yes it is true there are swine flu cases in Chile. Today I did a little calculation. I do know it is not accurate but it is a different attempt from the sensational attempt in the media

I will just recycle a comment I made earlier on Cachando Chile’s blog:

The normal flue kills 36,000 people in the US per year! The source is the US Government

Compare this to 85 swine flue deaths world wide.

Here is my extreme view on Chances of dying from swine flue in Chile. Take it with a grain of salt. The chance to get the virus is 29 out of 16.000.000 (I know this is rising) and then a 0.77% of actually dying from swine flu. Do we have any maths experts here to calculate the chances of dying from swine flu in terms of percentage?

It is more likely to die from biting your own tongue then from swine flu.

Posted in Chile | 9 Comments

9 Responses

on May 22, 2009 at 10:50 am La Gringa

Your numbers are encouraging!
I’m still looking for stats on how many people die of regular seasonal flu in Chile each year.
And thanks for turning us on to that link about the 30 Strangest Deaths (follow the biting your own tongue link). Very weird! Very Cool!
on May 23, 2009 at 10:00 am Liz

Thanks for this post!!! I wish somebody in Mexico should use this perspective instead of alarming the population. Mexicans were the most affected and not precisely for the disease but for all the scare spread by the media.
on May 25, 2009 at 8:06 pm Sara

LOL@ die biting your tongue. That would so happen to me.

Anyways, I agree with you. In the beginning when it was still new, I did buy into the hype a bit. However, now I’m not that worried. It is sort of weird with the mutation factor and if I get sick, does that mean I have pig DNA in my body? I don’t know. I’d just rather not get sick. Period. Swine flu or not.
on May 30, 2009 at 2:35 pm dude

0.000001395625% chance of dying from swine flu using the numbers you provided.

(29/16000000)*.0077

As you stated, this chance increases as the number of cases in Chile increase. Is the .77% mortality from the CDC?
- on July 10, 2009 at 5:52 pm André
  
  hey dude, thanks for filling in the blanks.
  
  the .77% was at the time total deaths divided by infected people. I know I exaggerated since of course swine flu is spreading and from the people infected at that time there would have still been the chance for some of them to pass away.
  
  Nevertheless it looks like the hype was too big although of course there is a chance for the virus to mutate.
on July 10, 2009 at 12:04 pm Kadmiel

you are correct it is a very remote chance of dying from the bug but are your numbers wold wide or just in chile?
- on July 10, 2009 at 5:49 pm André
  
  the numbers are completely outdated.
  
  I applied the worldwide number of deaths to the worldwide confirmed cases to calculate the chance of dying if infected. That was the number 0.77%
  
  In Chile we did not have a death at that time (May 22nd) and only 29 people infected. Now the number of infected is somewhere in the thousands.
on July 13, 2009 at 3:35 pm Lisa85856

Interesting stuff. Did you hear that there’s a new strain which is resistant to the anti-flu drugs? Tamiflu etc? Found a really good website for tracking it’s progress, seems to be updated every hour or so… http://www.swinefludeaths.co.uk.
on October 26, 2009 at 12:03 pm bryan

nice post, but it is really a big challenge for medical researcher how they handle this thread.