[discostu]

SARS was pure hysteria. All the transmissions happened in countries with crappy medical systems, we never got a patient 1 in the US inspite of importing at leats 3 patient 0s. It ran rampant in Canada becuase the same hospital allowed not one but TWO people killed by SARS to lie in high traffic halways for HOURS. When Canada finally started acting like they had a modern medical system they shut SARS down. A normal old every day see one or two every year flu is caught by more people and kills more people, SARS was entirely driven by media produced hysteria to fill time.

[burzum]

We had over 70 cases in the US, though we had no fatalities. Canada had 250 and lost 38. The main reason, once again, for the high transmissions in Canada was the stale air environments in which the patients were infected.

I disagree with you that SARS was hysteria. I just think it was killed before it got to critical mass. Most airborne infectious diseases grow at an exponential rate (a simplified equation is A=A0*k^(t/t_T) where A is the number infected at a time t, A0 is the initial number infected, k is the number of transmissions per person on average, and t_T is the average time to transmit to k people). In the early stages is is theoretically possible to mobilize enough resources to combat and defeat a disease. This was done with SARS. In the later stages, the exponential law overwhelms that option. Consider a normal flu virus. The number of infections due to the normal flu virus is past the critical mass point, and actions like quarantines will not reduce the infection rate appreciably. If avian flu becomes readily transmissible from human to human, I think it is highly probable that it will go past the critical mass point. With a potentially high mortality rate this is unfortunate. It should be noted that with US health-care, the mortality rate will probably be much smaller than that which is observed for the rest of the world (maybe 20%).