Friday, August 14, 2009

How Well Are We Managing the H1N1 Flu?

I'm no expert in virus propagation but I understand that this thing is spreading quite quickly: number of cases doubled from 14 to 29 in less than a week. And out of the 1,462 deaths recorded worldwide far too many have happened here. The other big question I have is whether that one Rs4.3 million machine that's testing 12 people a day is enough for the size of population we have given the number of tourists that visit us, the speed at which it is spreading and the size of our territory. Shouldn't we get more machines to test more citizens in time? We are after all a quarter-trillion-rupee economy.

The other thing I don't understand is why some kind of x-ray machine is not installed at the airport and at the port so that infected people are detected and stopped before they spread it around. Finally, has some exhaustive data analysis been carried out to figure out from where carriers are coming from and where it has spread on our island?

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