Fiction-Heavy PM Asks That We Stick to The Facts

With respect to the H1N1. He even went on to warn us of an unmitigated disaster if Tamiflu was doled out irresponsibly. If that's not an indication of what he thinks of the judgement of doctors in Mauritius in general I don't know what it is. For sure we all know one or two people with medical training who are complete idiots or who are not exactly Barnards or Penfields -- if you don't know what an idiot is. But I don't think it's fair to people who spend long and difficult years studying how the human body works.

And he said that after holding two press conferences within a few days to tell us that we had 5 dead and barely 50 confirmed cases. Parents with an internet connection or relatives with one of course didn't buy into this fiction and decided to keep their kids at home while Jeetah and colleagues were busy looking for the iceberg in the wrong places. The number of confirmed cases has now risen by a factor of 1,300 in just a few days. And government is reopening schools tomorrow because August 31st is a Monday and as everybody knows nothing keeps potentially deadly viruses like the H1N1 away as the first business day of the week.

Were we deliberately misled so that tourists are not scared off and some bean-counter somewhere does not get up in the middle of the night crying about some dumb growth rate number? Even if that meant counting more deads that we should have? Or was it Ramgoolam, after entertaining the fiction that SSR had something to do with free education, serving us some more of the good stuff?

Iceberg Still Not in Sight

5 dead out of 40 confirmed cases. That's 12.5% and according to the official numbers. The strangest part of it all is that the number of confirmed cases isn't rising fast enough to match the kind of stress our health system has been undergoing over the past couple of weeks. Our detection of the disease seems to have failed.

In the meantime, an increasing number of parents have assessed -- with the help of Google -- the risks better than our current slate of politicians and have decided to keep their kids at home until the storm has passed or official numbers start making more sense. Whichever comes first.

We will obviously need to set up a fact-finding committee to learn why the protocol did not spare each and every life that was lost.

Victoria Hospital Flu Stats 45 Times Lower

The MBC reported yesterday that out of 500 cases of seasonal influenza recorded there only 10 were of the H1N1 strain. That's a 2% prevalence and is about 45 times less than the rate the World Health Organisation's Global Influenza Surveillance Network has estimated for the southern hemisphere. Have we 38 confirmed cases because we are testing only 12 people per day?

Likewise Vasant Bunwaree was heard saying that out of 288 students exhibiting symptoms of flu only 1 was of the H1N1 variety. If the WHO prevalence rate was 10 times lower than the one it reported then about 26 of these students should be carrying the new virus.

And you can click here to find out which Tamiflu lot number have had their expiration date extended by the FDA.

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?