[eggman]

In the 6 months since SARS showed up it's traveled to fewer areas, infected fewer people and killed fewer victims than our annual flu outbreak does in half the time.

Flu does not typically require hospitalization for most people who contract it. If that is the case for SARS, then it is nothing to worry about. But that is not the case unless there are thousands of SARS cases not that are not being hospitalized. The hit this will have for heath care costs and insurance rates will be enormous.

SARS can take a healthy person and put them in the hospital for a week or more. That's much worse than the annual flu outbreak. Most of the deaths from flu are people who have weakened immune systems. That has not been the case with SARS from what I have read.

[discostu]

We don't know if SARS has required hospitalization for most people who contracted it, we have no idea how many have gone undetected and undiagnosed or even misdiagnosed (remember the first SARS death in Canada was initially diagnosed a heart attack). Actually I've seen people knocked down by the flu for months at a stretch, most of the major epidemics of the 20th century were from the flu, just because most flu bugs are nothing more than a tough cold don't knock the whole class. From what I've read a big chunk of SARS deaths were from the hospital in Toronto, people in the emergency room when they got the bug, not people at the pinacle of health.