At least the overtime is good...

Another year, another pandemic threat. Really, if these pesky animals weren’t so tasty to eat I’d say kill them all and be done with it…

This time it’s “Swine Flu”, believed to have mutated from a heady concoction of pig, bird and human flu viruses and now, if you believe the press, threatening to sweep the globe in a devastating pincer movement of which we should all be TERRIFIED.

Of course, by “sweep the globe” I do actually mean “possibly have killed 159 Mexicans”.

Now, I’m no expert on transmittable disease, nor am I an authority on population density, but a quick Googling of “Mexico: talk to me” yields any number of credible sources, the most reliable of whom (the good old BBC) informs me that Mexico has a population of almost 108 million, much of that crammed into densely populated cities where disease is more easily transmitted.

So then, 159 out of 108,000,000. My standard soul-sapping office issue Casio MX-8 calculator doesn’t allow me to enter more than 8 digits, so I rely on Windows’ own calculator to tell me that this figure represents 0.000147% to six decimal places. Scaled down to accomodate the UK’s comparatively meagre 61 million peeps that would represent around 90 fatalities.

Now again, I’m no expert (“Craig, really, stop putting yourself down!” you cry), but I’m willing to bet that as fucked up as the British NHS is it still sits a cut above Mexican health care provisions. Factor in the population density of our cities being considerably less and allow for other criteria I am nowhere near intelligent enough to have considered and I’d be willing to bet that…

…ooooh, two people will die here in the UK? Tops. The only thing that concerns me about this outbreak is that the UK government has been quite forceful in it’s assertion to the public that they have prepared for this kind of an event “for years”, yet despite the World Health Organisation’s warning yesterday that the disease was no longer containable it will still be “days” before we UK citizens receive public health information guideline leaflets through our doors.

Not so prepared after all, then.