CNN: Calm? No Never!
What is wrong with CNN? Everyone is trying to calm the American public’s worries about this Swine Flu Epidemic, and what does CNN do? They throw gas on the fire. Today they announced the “first U.S. death” associated with the outbreak. However, they don’t know anything about the child other than his or her age (they didn’t even know the gender) and that s/he came from Mexico. Well let me ask you something, CNN. If the child came from Mexico and was being treated in the United States, is that really a U.S. death? The fact that we haven’t had any deaths is not really because America is super rad and the flu knows to stay on the other side of the border. We have medicine here, and a higher standard of living. Americans are more likely to withstand a flu epidemic than Mexico just generally. The fact that this was a young child made it even less likely that even getting proper medical care it was going to survive.
I grieve for this child’s family and all the families who have been affected by this major health crisis, but making people paranoid and ratcheting up the panic level is not going to help anyone. Obviously, this is what CNN and any other news organization that cares about advertising dollars does, but that is a discussion for another time. For the moment, calm the heck down.
I agree with the ridiculous nature of the news. It’s pretty amazing watching NBC and then listening to NPR for the disparities in how the swine flu is covered. NBC brings in experts to plead with the public to keep their children at home and wash their hands all the time, while NPR spends time defining epidemic vs. pandemic and explains that the swine flu is probably just like any other flu.
The bottom line is that all evidence points to this virus as a typical (albeit severe) strain of influenza, for which we can and will develop a vaccine in a matter of months. While there is a risk for it to mutate, there are plenty of other viruses that are of equal concern. The media is getting way ahead of where we should be on the panic spectrum. Telling us that “pandemic is imminent” sounds like a prophesy of the end of the world. In reality, this means that the virus is probably widespread, but no different than other flu viruses. The common flu causes many deaths each year, so it is expected that there will also be deaths to swine flu. Everybody just relax… although I guess it doesn’t hurt to wash your hands.