Scare headline of the day comes from Folha Online: Gripe pode afetar até 67 milhões no Brasil em até oito semanas. [Flu could infect up to 67 million Brazilians in next 8 weeks]. My very rough translation of the first two paragraphs:
The population of Brazil is about 192 million, so the scenarios evidently assume an attack rate of around 35 percent. The report goes on to say, sensibly, that these projections may not work for H1N1, which is still not well understood.The flu pandemic caused by the novel A H1N1 virus could infect between 35 million and 67 million Brazilians within the next five to eight weeks. Between 3 million and 16 million will be ill enough to require some kind of treatment, and between 205,000 and 4.4 million will require hospitalization, according to the report by Helio Schwartsman, published this Sunday in Folha.
These scenarios are in the third version of the "Brazilian Plan of Preparation for an Influenza Pandemic," published in April 2006 by the Ministry of Health. It deals with a statistical mathematical model created by epidemiologists, based on earlier pandemic.
