Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone!

I have to admit, Mexican-Americans are certainly giving Irish-Americans a run for the money in the category of: "Ethnic Holidays In America Where Everyone Gets Plastered On A Specific Brand Or Type Of Beer." A few decades ago, St. Patrick's Day was pretty much the only entry in this category, although true Irish people (as opposed to "five generations ago someone in my family came from Ireland" Irish-Americans) would strenuously object to that category's title. I know exactly what their objection would be, too: "Guinness is a stout, not a 'beer'!"

Ahem.

On a much more serious note, Mexico and the H1N1 flu virus are in the news. Actually, for the past week or so they've pretty much been the news. Ever since last week, the so-called "swine" flu didn't just hit the headlines, it pushed everything else aside. The mainstream media went predictably berserk over the whole story, as is their wont. Nightly news shows devoted over half of their coverage to the issue, even though the death count in the United States currently stands at one (more people probably got killed by lightning in the same time period, to say nothing of traffic accidents). But the media bravely didn't let facts get in the way of a good story (especially one guaranteed to scare the pants off just about everyone).

The freakout was to be expected. Deadly illness, or even the threat thereof, is a serious matter. I'm just saying it should have been treated as such, instead of being used as fear-mongering to boost ratings.

Here are a few facts that the media conveniently forgot to report in the past week. (1) Numbers of deaths are absolutely meaningless without also reporting how many people got sick, and what the death rate as a percentage truly is. This context was needed, and was sorely lacking. (2) People who called for "closing the U.S. border with Mexico" truly had no concept of what this would mean. Are we going to bar U.S. citizens from returning to America? What if they decide to take a flight to a third country, how do we keep them out then? Are we going to close our borders and airports to the entire world, or what? (3) This is a big one. The 1917-1918 Spanish Flu, which even the official government disease control website lists as "The Mother of All Pandemics" had a death rate of -- are you sitting down? -- less than three percent. That was enough to kill 50 million people, so it is not to be sneezed at (so to speak). But 95 percent of the people who even caught the flu had cases which were "mild and essentially indistinguishable from influenza cases today." (4) This one, due to some pushback from the Obama administration, got a little bit of attention, but it bears repeating. Roughly 36,000 people in America die of flu-related causes every single year. This really puts the numbers into some sort of context which people can consider before panicking.

Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't take these things seriously. We should. But for Pete's sake, can't we please use some numbers and math to put it into a tiny shred of context? But the media had much more fun scaring everyone into thinking they were all going to die by next Tuesday.

Having said all of that, I want to point out something else that got lost in this pandemic of pandemic-fear-mongering. Which is that the public health officials, all the way up to President Obama himself, have a mighty tough job. They have to thread an incredibly complex needle, and they deserve credit for doing their best.

There are measures which the government can take in a health emergency. There is a whole range of options, as a matter of fact. The most severe of these is quarantine and closing down borders, and (what Mexico actually did, and what the rest of the world should be extremely grateful for) closing down your entire economy for five days in an effort to halt the disease's spread in its tracks before it gets out of control. Less severe are things like stockpiling medicine and medical supplies. The least severe is to just tell everyone to wash their hands.

But almost none of them (with the exception of that last one) are easy decisions to make. It's like being mayor of a city, and deciding whether to order an evacuation (or not) in the face of a hurricane. You know for a fact that some people are going to die if you evacuate -- people who wouldn't have died if you hadn't evacuated. Statistically, it is all but inevitable. But if you do nothing, and don't evacuate, even more people may die. So you perform a risk/benefit analysis, and make your decision, and hope for the best. That's all you can do. Hopefully, the politicians who make decisions like this listen to the scientists and get the best possible data, and make preparations even if they don't evacuate. But still, the order to stay or go comes down to one man or one woman faced with an extremely difficult choice.

With a health emergency, a similar calculation takes place. Almost any action you order will have bad unintended consequences that would not have happened if you did nothing. That's the risk. People may die. Even just shutting down public transportation may mean someone doesn't get to a pharmacy to get needed heart medicine, and winds up dead as a result. As with a hurricane, the danger of the disease is real and on the horizon, but you have no way of knowing how bad the situation will be when it hits. Will the flu be devastatingly deadly, or not? Will the emergency measures do more harm than good? Even vaccinating everyone carries risks, as a fraction will die as a result of getting vaccinated.

And everyone -- everyone -- is just waiting to "Monday morning quarterback" your decision, after the fact. The "close the border" debate is a good example. Sure, it sounds good, as a knee-jerk response to the problem, but the devil is in the details. Will it work? Is it a pointless "feel good" exercise? Will it cause more problems than it solves? Whom, exactly, are we going to keep out or let in? And what do we do when someone flies from Mexico to the Bahamas, and then into the U.S.? This is all before you even start to consider the economic fallout from the decision -- which would be massive.

So I'd just like to say that, personally, I feel for the people who have these decisions to make. No matter what they do, no matter what they decide, some people are going to say they blew it, after the fact. And some people will become absolutely outraged over their decision, no matter what.

They have to weigh the factors and make what they consider the best call for us all, and I do not envy them the responsibility. If they move too quickly or too radically, they run the risk of the disease not being as bad as predicted and everyone saying they just "called wolf." If they move too slowly or too timidly, they run the risk of the disease getting out of control anyway, and people later saying "you should have moved more quickly!"

So I just have to say I have a lot of respect for the people actually making decisions on the flu and public health, because they have an almost-impossible job of predicting the future -- with people's lives on the line no matter what they decide. And the media going nutso-bonkers over the story (instead of just calmly examining the facts) certainly doesn't help.

-- Chris Weigant