Every so often, I hear some one yells ‘fire’ and many on flu boards get anxious, as though the pandemic already started or on our door step. In a previous thread, I suggested that it was impossible To Catch A Falling Knife, and a paced preparation is the best approach.
As the pandemic gets closer to becoming a reality, I think it is important to have some way of ‘triaging’ the news, especially the ‘bad news’, otherwise we may be hit with so many false alarms that the end result is we are burnt out or we take the real one as crying wolf. I would like to hear ideas of how one would address this. I will start with a list of sources of information or opinion and prioritize them by:
fidelity (how accurate or credible), actionability (can I do anything about it), and action time window (if I don’t take action now, will it be too late).
I have prioritized sources of information, news, analysis or opinion, based on when we know about it:
1. Official announcements from the WHO or governments - it’s likely too late to do much, but there’s always something left.
2 Feel good and assuring communications from governments that are unexpected
3. Flu board news or rumors of unusual government activities signaling a deployment of stockpile
4. Flu board news and analysis of cases indicating efficient H2H
5. Unusual recruitment or training of volunteers
6. Scientific papers on Epidemiology
7. Scientific papers on Virology
8. Speculation on Epidemiology and Virology
Please add to the ‘watch’ list.
bump
ANON-YYZ – at 01:21 This is a very good idea and I would like to add one. During the past year, we have seen several examples of reporters using quotes from reputable doctors or scientists as the basis of illogical but dramatic claims. These stories often find their way here and many of us discuss the ‘new information’. It usually takes a while to see that it is not new, the reporter embellished an old quote.
Perhaps we could keep track of the published comments of public primary sources and use them as the initial basis of reviewing the newsworthiness or fidelity to the source. It seems that as the story heats up, more reporters and commentators will be covering this for the first time and taking a mulligan.
“1. Official announcements from the WHO or governments - it’s likely too late to do much, but there’s always something left.
2 Feel good and assuring communications from governments that are unexpected “
ROTF (K&S) “It’s twue, it’s twue!” These are good signals…
Remember public, those “Ready” campaigns that say,
“Have a family emergency plan”; that’s how they told you “get ready for a Pandemic Influenza Year”, got it?
When they say “stay if you have the ‘flu’ “ = they mean stay home if you have killer pandemic flu…
because there’s nothing they can do for you, not even make a workable mass fatality management plan,
and they will say, you’d been warned about pandemic, ok?
(Even if they didn’t pass along how Dr.Osterholm explained it to Congress….nor how Dr. Nabarro explained it, nor how Dr.Webster explained it…)
Don’t even ask tptb what “triage” and “palliative care” are going to mean…
I think the cat will pop out of the bag — some nurse will be best buddies with the lab tech who will confirm H5N1 and the nurse will tell . . . and it’ll be around the water cooler — the problem is the lag time between collecting the sample and having it test positive for muliple people (as we see in Indonesia — by the time Kid two and three are tested, Auntie One has been cremated.
We already see news reports when seasonal flu hits a school district — when there are 20+ deaths, I think it will be news that can’t be contained. I think it was Anon 451 who felt that 155 cases in a region in twenty days or less could be a significant occurance. That’s a significant up tick from the ones and twos that we are seeing now (in Indonesia and Egypt). For the moment, that’s my signal to pull in the welcome mat.
bump for discussion after the Quebec rumor fiasco.
Good Idea YYZ!! - dont know how I missed this when you first posted it!