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Youser, all of life is a crap shoot, and I'm not going to dwell on the possibility of waking up in the hospital after a car accident, heart attack, or slipping on a pile of fresh chicken poo and cracking my head. I refuse to live in fear because of what-if's.
I admitted to having a couple of rare health episodes last week, and others who are equally healthy are opening up with their recent experiences as well. Let's keep an eye on this stuff, people, if for no reason other than to give each other support because this could get serious. I'm hoping that a year from now, we can take all that food we've saved up, get together, and have a picnic or something.
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A friend of mine who works on boats likes to say that he hopes to work on painting a boat some day, step back to admire it and say "Thats a damn good paint job" and then keel over dead.
No fuss, no muss.
Mac nut
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centipede, amen.
Your chances of biting it on an yearly basis are solidly 1 percent or better, and much more every day as you go on. Pandemic? So what. . .we have bigger fish to fry.
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Well, speaking of, we're risk factor 5 now, just after the markets close. Probably time to step up the urgency of thinking ahead as it seems all but inevitable we'll have some impact here, if only financial.
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It seems raising to level 5 is automatic if there is human-to-human transmission in more than one country.
Still no deaths reported outside Mexico (except for the Mexican girl in Texas) so no panic called for.
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Mella,
I, too, will be on a flight soon. And no masks ALREADY? Are you really going to wear it? I'll have to decorate mine. If I can find one.
I hope you are having fun on BI. I am enjoying seeing old friends and doing Maui things and being on my favorite beach -- Baldwin.
My friend is having a tough time and I am afraid it will get more difficult for her unless a miracle occurs. Open to those.
Let's fry those fish, Jay!
april
april
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JWFITZ, I think I understand the first portion of your posting and if so, thanks because the way I'm reading it, I like your percentages. However, I'm extremely curious to know what issue you believe is more immediate and deadly than the possibility of a pandemic.
I had mentioned a person who went to the doctor a few days ago. She has been diagnosed with pneumonia, not flu.
I guess we should be glad that it's the end of the flu season rather than the beginning. I'm hoping this cuts down on the number of cases and severity.
What's creepy is that the 1918 pandemic took about the same number of lives as all who were killed in WW2. The war officially lasted 6 years while the pandemic lasted just 10 months. To put it another way, the virus killed people about 7 times faster than the most violent war in the history of the world.
Let's be glad we live in an age that's far superior to that of 1918. We caught the bugger mucho pronto and have technology that people back then couldn't even dream about. This is a real big plus because when you compare the world population back then to now and factor in the mortality rates, we could have been faced with hundreds of millions of deaths. It could still happen, but then again, it could fizz out next week.
So far the economic impact I've seen on Hawai'i is that people who had booked vacations in Mexico are cancelling and rebooking in Hawai'i. While it could certainly change - if cases appear here, or people become afraid to fly at all, right now this ups our tourism. We lose lots of people to relatively inexpensive Mexican destinations.
I am taking this flu seriously. My folks live in southern New Mexico and my dad has a fear of the flu anyway. Praying it resolves!
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We all are, KathyH. The world is holding its breath.
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Hi Cent.
Risk analysis in most ways is a risky business in itself, and is never a very factual process, always involving arbitrary assumptions that are pretty subjective. So much of it is comparing apples to apples and not to stones. If we get a full blown pandemic we're in a whole new risk class--and to compare it then again to my original comparison the risk of getting killed by a drunk driver, well, I guess I'd have to compare living through a current flu epidemic to being in a car that's already flown off the highway. In a lot of ways statistical stuff like that is just a bunch of wonky nonsense anyhow and the more particular to a case one tries to make it the less useful the observation will be.
My only point in any of this is to encourage personal action towards thoughtful and sensible preparation, and to neither panic nor live in denial. I've near a 100 percent chance of getting prostate cancer if I live long enough. That reality isn't going to affect much about how I go about my day today.
