The Crude H1N1 death rate has risen since the first of June. This is a not the regular seasonal flu. Most people shrug it off so many say its no big deal but it is. 10 year old in Alaska was sent home by the school nurse last Thursday around noon. Friday night he was dead. A 41 year old man from NZ who flew to Canada for Worldskills died of it. He was training for a marathon.
Helen Branswell of Canada's Globe and Mail is filing some of the best reports. She wrote on Sept 1st:
“I've never seen this,” says Dr. Paul Hebert, editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal and an intensive care physician in Ottawa who has treated several of these patients. “As an ICU doctor, it's very, very, very rare I can't deliver enough oxygen to someone to keep him alive. They die of other things, right? They die because their organs fail.” “In this case, we can barely oxygenate them.”Some patients are being put on ECMO machines (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation)--artificial lungs. Their lungs are so full of snot that putting them on mechanical ventilation causes their lungs to blow up. The death rate isn't a 1918 but it is approaching 1958. But what is really going to cause problems are not enough ECMO and other equipment. ICUs in New Zealand and Australia were beyond their max. And they don't have near the social pathologies which flood, on a daily basis, our emergency rooms.
I’m skeptical.
But to whatever extent we face a threat from any medical problem, that’s more reason not to have government control of health care.
Let me be clear: if a bunch of people do get really sick, government control of their treatment will be a death sentence.