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

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.