Somebody Tell Me Again Why I'm Supposed to Be Worried

[rowyn]

According to the Wall Street Journal, SARS, the latest thing in terrifying disease, has infected 8,810 people worldwide, of whom, 802 have died.

Now, not to trivialize the deaths of anyone, but why, exactly, is this such a big deal? Let's take, oh, the flu, for comparison purposes. You know, that virus that some people get shots for every year, and many just take their chances and suffer with when they acquire it.

According to the Center for Disease Control, about 36,000 people die of the flu in the United States alone every year.

Granted, I don't know what percentage of people who contract the flu die of it every year, but I do expect the chance-of-death for people who've contracted the flu is considerably lower than the 9.1% that SARS is currently running at. Still, look at the overall odds for the USA, here:

Flu Deaths: 36,000
SARS Deaths: 0

I mean, you've got to figure this shouldn't be a big issue for us, right? If we're going to panick over something, it ought to be all those people who stagger in to work, guzzling cough medicine and suppressing nausea and running fevers of 102. Because they're the ones killing us. Not the people who happen to run a Chinese restuarant.

Really -- what am I missing here? Why does SARS get so much publicity? Why is this such a big deal? Is it somehow especially contagious and deadly, and yet, by dint of sheer medical know-how, quarantine, and treatment, the overall number of cases and deaths have been kept astonishingly low?

What's the big deal?

Comments

[prester-scott.livejournal.com]

Why are people more afraid of terrorist attacks by pulmonary anthrax or radiological bomb, than of fellow drivers running red lights?

[rowyn]

Well, this is just me, but I really think it's because people are bad at math.

[prester-scott.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think "fear of the unknown" is the greater contributor.

[rowyn]

OK, good point. Though I can call on the existence of the lottery and the proliferation of casinos to back my hypothesis. :)

[prester-scott.livejournal.com]

No, I contend that "hope against all odds" is a similar phenomenon to "fear of the unknown." It's still a fixation on a highly-emotionally-charged outcome (good or bad) that elicits one to bypass rational calculations of risk.

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

Partially, the misinformation surrounding SARS has to do with it. The Chinese government denied its existence for several months untill undeniable evidence was presented. Plus, there was the double-whammy of all hospitals being shut down in Toronto, something that never happened in my lifetime, nor my parents, even during Polio epidemics, with health care workers becoming infected despite precautions and the WHO saying the cause had not been determine; yet the incredibly slanted, government funded, Canadian news sources were saying "THERE IS NO PROBLEM HERE. CALM DOWN AND GO HOME."

Who to believe? Hysterical reporters... or... hysterical government reporters? I felt touched by superstition. One might catch it, one might not recover, and there was no clear way of protecting against it, except avoiding anyone that was coughing in airports, or looked like they had been to Hong Kong, Singapore or China, had relatives there, or might have relatives there.

In fact, while I was in Toronto, the daily "potentially infected and being observed" number was repeated, over and over, and increased slowly. The number of deaths also kept counting up, but the number of people recovered and released didn't. There was the sensation that there was a vast ward of people, who might die, but hadn't yet because they were being pumped full of drugs. With once again, no trustworthy source of information.

By comparison, everyone knows what the flue is, how one can get it, and that you're likely to recover on your own.

[rowyn]

True, good point. Though I have to wonder if shutting down all the hospitals in Toronto was an overreaction. The current totals show 321 cases in Canada and 33 dead ... it seems like more damage would be caused by denying emergency services than by staying open and risking the spread of disease.

OTOH, maybe it would've been much worse if they hadn't shut down the hospitals. It's certainly something that would've been difficult to judge at the time.

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

Last I heard, about a month ago, it was 208 cases and 11 dead. Did you see anything about the people who had recovered?

Part of the problem is that the usual defenses don't work

[telnar.livejournal.com]

One problem is that SARS is more virulent than most flu strains. While the flu kills far more people, it isn't much risk to a young healthy person (which is why most authorities recommend that only a subset of the population needs to get flu shots). SARS, in contrast, will kill 5-10% of people with otherwise strong immune systems. This makes it a potentially greater threat (since, the natural limit to the damage it could do is much higher than for the flu).

Of course, there are plenty of less rational components to all this as well (e.g. the fact that it's new and dramatic), and I'd be the last person to claim that Americans do rational risk assessment, but I did want to point out that not all of the concern is irrational.

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

It's simple: there were a lot of unknowns for SARS. We didn't know where it came from, how it spread, how virulent it was, how long its incubation period was. As we got more information, the panic settled down.

It could have been a disaster. The flu of 1918 killed more people than World War I -- and it was far less deadly than SARS is.

[rowyn]

I guess what I'm wondering is: could it have been a disaster along the scale of influenze in 1918? Were the various safety precautions taken necessary and warranted, or was it overreaction to hype?

Certainly some of the measures I've heard people taking are just plain stupid. But others, like the Chinese government shutting down public swimming pools, funeral homes refusing to take bodies, etc., seem more borderline. I don't know if that was an overreaction, or appropriate, or "inappropriate as it turns out, but reasonable at the time given an absence of information."

I really don't feel like I've gotten a good grounding on what we knew, what we didn't know, and how reasonable the reactions were in light of our relative ignorance.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Panic makes great headlines!

[rowyn]

PANIC!

Hmm. Yeah, could be. :)

[level-head.livejournal.com]

What do you expect people to be concerned about? Cancer and heart disease, at some 500k to 1m deaths per year in this country?

Malaria, about five million a year?

SARS is a much safer thing to worry about.

There is a bizarre mindset that goes into risk calculation; almost a "safety in numbers" that is, on examination, somewhat irrational. A hundred people in an airplane crash will get a hundred times the attention given to ten thousand people dead in car accidents.

===|==============/ Level Head

[rowyn]

Actually, to be fair, I don't mind that people don't get wound into a tizzy over car accidents or flu deaths. I don't even mind that the media makes a fuss over SARS and not malaria. SARS is, after all, new and one presumes, therefore, news.

What irks me is the disproportionate measures people take to "protect" themselves from SARS (like not going to Chinatown O.o) or anthrax-laced envelopes (like opening your mail with gloves and a mask on). I really liked the antrhrax website whose "tips to protect yourself" were along the lines of "Eat right, get some exercise, and see your doctor periodically, because this will have A MUCH GREATER IMPACT on your lifespan than anything you could do about a highly unlikely form of terrorist attack".

Re:

[level-head.livejournal.com]

That makes a lot of sense, in fact.

And reducing your level of stress by teaching yourself to think about such things reasonably would help a lot of folks, perhaps even more.

We are pretty resilient -- but we don't recover well from what we think about ourselves.

===|==============/ Level Head