Best Guess

We have to be grown up and act grown up. We must put away childish things. It sucks we know but we have to be parents. The great thing about the Internet is access to information. You can trust AND verify while you trust. You just can't do it in real time. When the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) met the press on Friday, September 18, 2009 - the press wasn't prepared. There were some shining stars but even they got blind sided.

You can read the transcript or listen to audio mp3 file or view the video. We tend to enjoy reading more because we get bored and want to hurry on to the next sentence and bypass the really boring parts. When you listen to the government there are a lot of really boring parts.

The media made the CDC afraid to guess. The question we hoped that someone would ask was asked. It wasn't answered but it was asked. "Stephen Smith with "Boston Globe." So in CDC are there actual working estimates of how many deaths from H1N1 might result this fall? And have those changed over time with a better understanding of the virus? And how should the public and public health officials, for that matter, square these planning scenario figures with the CDC's own data showing that so far there have been fewer than 1,000 H1N1 deaths?"

"Dan Jernigan: Yes. You point out the difference between planning scenarios and monitoring what's going on. And so we have ways of estimating the numbers of deaths, the numbers of hospitalizations, looking to see what we're seeing with the actual numbers coming in, how do they compare to what we might expect. Some of that information I think is very close to coming out that we would be able to provide to you. Similar to how Dr. Lipsitch's information came out as well. We are likely to have numbers that look very similar to what Dr. Lipsitch had. But the virus I think we have to continue to monitor. There's only so much that you can do with forecasting. It helps us to understand what resources might be needed, what policies might need to be changed. But we don't want to provide a very specific number because all of those numbers are estimates. They're based on many assumptions. So we want that information that comes out to be as realistic as possible. The -- through the summer we have been collecting a lot of information, have been working with a lot of collaborators, and I think that's really helped us refine the numbers so that they will be as accurate as possible."

What the!?!?! What? Dr. Lipsitch is Marc Lipsitch, a Harvard School of Public Health epidemiologist, who speculated that the official count of swine flu deaths - it stands below 1,600, as of the middle of last week - “is certainly an underestimate of the number of deaths. It may be a bad underestimate or it may be a modest underestimate, but it is certainly an underestimate.’’ (BOSTON.COM)

The Boston Globe and BOSTON.COM in the same article just before quoting Dr. Lipsitch also quoted: “People die of heart attacks and pneumonias and so on who wouldn’t have died if they hadn’t been infected with influenza,’’ said Dr. David Ozonoff, a flu specialist at the Boston University School of Public Health. “But if you look at many of those death certificates, they won’t have influenza as the immediate cause or even the contributing cause.’’

His is an opinion we echo because we're in agreement. FOX News and others have been quoting Dr. Lipsitch's presentation “Modeling and Epidemiology of H1N1 Pandemic” on Wednesday, September 16, 2009 before the US The Institute of Medicine. Unfortunately no one read or viewed the presentation which models the info based on May and June of 2009 to reach his conclusion.

As part of a group of five (5) experts who offered a method of preventing a pandemic that we hope and pray will be institutionalized. If we had listen then and acted earlier we might have substantially reduced the amount of deaths still to come. It still might not be too late. We might get that barn door closed in time.