The Avian Flu was 'all the buzz' a few years back, but people have become immune to the fear (or perhaps fear can only be sustained for a certain length of time, before we have to put it aside in order to live). Therefore, the CDC's recent report on health and safety measures to implement in case of a pandemic, again heightened our awareness of the catastrophic outcomes.
To help States determine when to implement various public health measures, the Federal Government has developed a system of 5 different levels of alerts. The gauge is analogous to the one used for hurricanes, although "case fatality ratio," not wind speed, is the key variable in determining the level of alert to use.
Case fatality ratio is the fraction of ill people who die. In the Spanish flu, which killed about 50 million people worldwide, the ratio in the United States was about 2.2 percent. (It was 10 times as high in some other parts of the world.) Spanish flu in modern America would kill about 1.8 million people; it is Category 5.
Among the government's new guidelines for how states should plan for the next flu pandemic:
• For a Category 1 pandemic, the least severe, controversial steps such as school closings are not recommended.
• For a Category 2 pandemic, a strain as severe as the last worldwide outbreak in 1968, states might consider closing schools -- but for no more than a month -- or other steps such as people keeping a few feet away from each other. But the government doesn't recommend it.
• For a Category 4 pandemic, or a Category 5 pandemic as bad as in 1918, when 50 million people worldwide died, states should close schools from one to three months depending on local illness levels.
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