Pandemic II: The Online Game

This game is so addicting and relavant to this class.     

Check this game out that I just happened upon called Pandemic II.

Basically you creat your own disease and try and destroy the world. As your disease involves it can cause different symptoms, pick up different immunities, and develop different mediums of transmission. The game depends on a lot of chance as well, just like in real life. If there are 20 infected people in a country, what are the chances that one of them are gonna get on a plane and go to another country. A lot less than if there are 30 million people infected. Also the governments start to close borders, shut down airports, and close sea ports as the disesase becomes a more visible and serious problem. The world will try and engineer a vaccine that may work and put a halt to the spread of your disease, may fail and they may have to try again, or it may cause a mutation in your disease that will make it so that there can never be another vaccine made to stop your disease. I'm not sure how realistic the last possibility is, but you can always knock out the world's major hospitals and then they can't try and make a vaccine anyway.

Perfect example of what most people picture the apocalyptic disease that is going to destroy the world.

Swine Flu: Pandemic or Fear Mongering?

The swine flu is the newest disease that is going to wipe out a significant portion of the world's population. This is horrible because it happened after the world wide massive outbreak of avian flu, and our already decimated world infrastructure is vunerable to this new disease.

Obviously nothing I just said is true. None of this ever happened but I have spent the last weeks listening to the horrible "pandemic" that has gripped the nation and the world. Now I have already seen News stations giving advice on what to do when the NEXT swine flu outbreak occurs. There never was a pandemic. The World Health Organization pandemic alert system can be deceiving. When they raised the world from phase 4 to phase 5, you don't know how many people I heard talk about how bad it must be getting. But if you look at what this rating system means, a phase 5 means a pandemic is IMMINENT! Meaning we don't have a pandemic on our hands...

Another thing to note... we have drugs that reduce the severity of swine flu. Tamiflu and Rolenza are effective if taken within the first 48 hours of infection. 

I understand that Swine flu has killed several people, and is definitely an issue that we should be dealing with. My problem is that everytime something like this happens... I hear about how the world is gonna end. What are we gonna do when we lose 20% of our population and stores start to close? What are we going to do when the schools close? All public places are gonna be shut down! BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH. I'm sick of hearing these things and then the News completely forgets about the "end of the world virus" to talk about our week of bad weather. 

While it annoys me, I suppose I would prefer that we be overprepared than underprepared and if something serious did happen. I would think that our little freak outs over something like this will only help us prepare for something that actually become a very serious problem. I just think that by the time something serious DOES happen its gonna be the little boy who cried wolf situation (or at least for me), while the majority of the population seems to be suckered in to running to Sams and Costcos (who probably make a killing in these situations) and stocking up for the next giant disaster.