Via The Ottawa Citizen: Prevention post-mortem. Excerpt:
…Canada resisted pulling out all the stops for H1N1. This was not the full pandemic flu plan in action. That plan, adopted in 2004 but not yet used, is far more sweeping. It involves setting up 165 mobile hospitals that hold up to 200 patients each, and using refrigeration trucks or even hockey arenas as makeshift morgues.
So the impression that the Canadian response to H1N1 was a gross overreaction is mistaken. Besides, there is a spinoff benefit of all the H1N1 vaccinations: A huge number of Canadians now have some protection for when the next H1N1 virus hits, just as exposure to the 1957 virus gave protection this year.
If there’s an area where the WHO and Canadian officials should perform better, it probably is communication. The term “pandemic” was never properly understood. It refers more to geography than lethality — that is, a pandemic is a global outbreak, rather than a virus that is necessarily a major killer.
H1N1 was indeed a global outbreak, and therefore a pandemic in a technical sense, but the WHO should, before another mutant flu bug arises, develop a scale that measures danger to health as well as geographic spread.
