According to the government, the birdemic has so far claimed the lives of 29 Taiwanese people since it started in March 2020. For perspective, I checked the official cause of death statistics from the Ministry of Health and Welfare to see how many people had died of flu or pneumonia in recent years. (When flu kills, it generally does so indirectly through pneumonia, as does the birdemic.) No numbers have yet been released from 2020, but here are the flu/pneumonia death tolls for the four years preceding.
- 2019: 15,715
- 2018: 13,725
- 2017: 12,869
- 2016: 12,790
- Mean: 13,325
So if birdemic deaths should increase 50,000% from where they stand now, then we would be justified in saying that the birdemic had reached the status of -- just the flu, bro. How much higher than that it would have to go to be considered a national emergency justifying martial law is a judgment call.
What the government in fact decided to do was to go totalitarian after just 14 people -- a milliflu -- had died.
(Note: In an older post, I gave the 2019 flu death toll as 89, when in fact it was 530, plus 15,185 pneumonia deaths. I'm not sure where that incorrect figure came from.)
2 comments:
You know - sometimes I beginn to wonder if this birdemic is just an excuse for going totalitarian worldwide...
Then I remember *that* would be a right-wing, white-supremacist, domestic-terrorist fundamentalist-Christian conspiracy theory... and I come to my senses, strap on my second mask while sheltered in my underground positive-pressure laminar flow pod, and book the third peck.
Another way of putting it:
So far Taiwan has never had more than 6 birdemic deaths in a single day.
If 60 people -- 10 times the maximum so far -- were to die every single day from now until the end of the year, the total death toll for 2021 would be almost as high as the average yearly flu/pneumonia death toll for 2016-2019.
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