Outbreak: Might the Worst Case Scenario Not Be So Bad?

ABC News’ Hanna Siegel reports:

“All of humanity is really under threat during a pandemic,” so said Dr. Margaret Chan of the World Health Organization yesterday during a press conference about the increasingly worrisome swine flu.  Fueling the panic further or erring on the side of caution, depending on how you look at it, thousands of children have been kept out of school all across the United States despite the fact that the confirmed number of cases in this country stands at a grand total of 109. 

There is an experiment that is getting some attention today that tries to imagine how bad this flu will be. Professor Dirk Brockmann of Northwestern University, has used a computer program to simulate the effect of the swine flu in the United States four weeks from now if there were no preventative measures taken.  In other words, the worst case scenario. So what did he find?  Based on the very limited amount of information available thus far on this virus, if no medications were administered or preventative measures taken, we’d be looking at 1,700 confirmed cases of swine flu about one month from now.  A lot of sick people, yes, but the human race in danger?  No. 

As we said, Prof. Brockmann has only extremely limited amount of information to input into the model.  There isn’t a whole lot known about how the H1N1 virus spreads so the results of this or any model at this point is at best a very rough approximation.  Public health officials all say it is too early to know how this develop.

Professor Brockmann’s team is constantly recalculating their results, taking into account newly confirmed cases and weighing the efforts that have been taking toward eradicating the disease.  To stay abreast of their latest findings and learn more about his study, visit their website.