As Wednesday closes, A Pandemic Chronicle sums it up

i-0daa72df5f356263099d92ba26f596ee-9B59C675-981B-454C-B0C3-39B982AC35D6.jpg

It'd be nice to think otherwise. But even as WHO moves to Phase 5, recognizing that there is sustained human-to-human spread of this virus, we're still not sure how much punch it has. Which, as SophieZoe points out at A Pandemic Chronicle doesn't leave us with much :

Beyond the change in the official alert level we know no more today than we knew yesterday, which was pretty much nothing at all.

We do not yet know how the virus is going to behave in the general population and how severe or mild the disease will be on average. We do not even know if the virus will show %u201Csticking power%u201D and not just burn itself out in a week or two, whether naturally, or helped along by aggressive mitigation efforts.

We don't know any number of things that we need to know, but there are great minds working feverishly to find us the answers. Until we have them we are utterly clueless about what we will and what we will not face. So, along with the rest of the world I await answers.

I would amend only by saying we know enough that we should be worried. .

More like this

I've been seeing a lot of comments mocking the current outbreak of H1N1, and a lot of people (and journalists) who don't understand what "big deal" is about the "snoutbreak" of swine influenza, or don't get what the raising of the World Health Organization's pandemic alert phase up to 5 means. I…
I had to look this up, so to save others the trouble of finding it, here is the WHO href="http://www.who.int/csr/disease/avian_influenza/phase/en/index.html">explanation of pandemic alert levels: In nature, influenza viruses circulate continuously among animals, especially birds. Even though…
World Health Organization raised the influenza pandemic alert to level 5. Phase 5 Pandemic (Click to embiggen) Phase 5 is characterized by human-to-human spread of the virus into at least two countries in one WHO region. While most countries will not be affected at this stage, the declaration of…
There will be an update from CDC later today and WHO's expert committee established under the new International Health Regulations (IHR) meets via teleconference this morning North American east coast time at 10 am (4 pm Geneva time) to consider whether the swine flu situation merits declaring it “…