Lydiaa wrote:
[Of course it does. Flu spread by contact, especially one with sufficient difference to the regular flu, this makes the swine flu especially contagious due to a lower % of people having immunity.
That hasn't got anything to do with awareness. Awareness doesn't give more people immunity.
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All the school closing and in Aust free passes to stay home from work if you were sick with symptoms of the flu (not sure if it’s the same over in the US) ensured that the populations were not congregated with those who were sick, thus minimising the spread.
While true, this also has nothing to do with awareness, nor is it even neessarily helpful since minimizing the spread also reduces the number of people who catch the virus and then develop immunity.
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Also keep in mind that by containing the flu to smaller numbers, the health sector is not over whelmed and thus have more resources to spend on those who did catch it. If there were more cases, even thoug it may not be as deadly as the government portrayed it, the over whelming of health systems will ensure at least more death than it currently is.
You don't know that the health care systems would have been overwhelmed. Your original statement was that less hype meant less awareness, which meant that the risk of a pandemic rose, but there's still nothing to indicate that even no awareess at all would have resulted in a pandemic, or that it would have overwhelmed health care systems. For any form of flu, the primary treatment is bed rest and avoiding dehydration; you don't need a hospital or clinic for that.