Pandemic (Redux)

Yes, yes, I know I have talked about disasters and pandemics and all that sort of thing way too much. From now on, if you haven't already been doing so, you can keep track of the 2009 influenza 'they said it would not be one' pandemic on your own at this reliable and frequently updated webpage.

Atlantis has about 600 casualties as of this hour. Someone should do a per capita analysis. I think, that as Jared Diamond has pointed out before, city living is a prime cause of the spread of contagion. Cities are reservoirs for this sort of thing, since people have little or no choice but to come into range of the diseased. If your entire country is a city-state, then you can expect to be pretty much doomed to suffer the complexities of pandemic management.

Meanwhile, the Southern Cross tribe has claimed that their own high figures are due to better detection of disease, and that if everyone else (especially the people of the Beautiful Land) were as honest as they, the figures would be much higher. Someone said that about a million of the Beautiful People have got it, although they say they only have about 25,000.

Currently, things aren't too bad. But way back in 1918, things got really bad. An estimated 3-6% of the world's population died then, from the 1918 H1N1 influenza virus. Almost a century later, could the bad old times be set to roll once more?

Meanwhile, the Indic Syndics have claimed that their billions of people have only suffered about 70 casualties and no deaths. Statistically interesting, I'd say. The 1918 bug killed 17 million of them.