Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Will People Heed Warnings When the Next Pandemic Comes?

We had it easy with the H1N1 flu pan­demic that hit us in 2009 to early-2010. It wasn’t the killer virus that experts had been telling every­one to plan for and to expect. It wasn’t a replay of 1918. The real dan­ger now is that the boy cried wolf, and peo­ple may not heed the warn­ing again next time.

When Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina hit New Orleans, many of those who had elected to stay in the city – against the advice of friends & fam­ily, and in the face of all the warn­ings that offi­cials had given – were seniors who seri­ously thought that every­one was over­re­act­ing. After all, in their decades of expe­ri­ence, they had seen bad storms and they had come through hur­ri­canes before. In their expe­ri­ence, the boy was cry­ing wolf but it was noth­ing more than a pup. So, when Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina hit with full force and with all its fury, they found them­selves trapped – and many didn’t make it out.

That is a pat­tern that hap­pens very often. Those who have had expe­ri­ence with minor events are more likely to dis­re­gard offi­cial warn­ings when a seri­ous event is com­ing. In their own per­sonal expe­ri­ence, each time in the past some­thing hap­pened, it hadn’t been all that bad. So why should this time be any different?

That, I fear, is what will hap­pen the next time pan­demic warn­ings are issued. Until peo­ple start dying, the pub­lic will not lis­ten – they will shrug off the warn­ings even more than they did for the H1N1 pan­demic of 2009. By then, it may be too late to take action. After all, it takes 2 weeks for a per­son to fully develop immu­nity to a new pathogen after being inoc­u­lated with a vac­cine. In that time, the per­son who has received the vac­cine is still vulnerable.

Many peo­ple shrugged off the H1N1 vac­cine. It’s just the flu, they said. They had never got­ten a flu shot before, they had got­ten sick with the flu a few times over the years or maybe never at all, and they’re still healthy as can be.

We were all lucky this time around, par­tic­u­larly those who did not get vac­ci­nated. Will we be so lucky again next time?

Ontario’s pub­lic com­mu­ni­ca­tion mes­sage dur­ing the pan­demic was “It’s a Dif­fer­ent Flu Sea­son.” I have my doubts regard­ing its effec­tive­ness. True, we got about a 38% vac­ci­na­tion rate, which is higher than almost any­where else in the world, but that is still far below the 60%-70% that our epi­demi­ol­o­gists said would have been nec­es­sary to “stop” the pan­demic in its tracks here in Ontario. Peo­ple just didn’t trust the vac­cine, and they didn’t believe that the “the flu” would be a killer.

How much more dif­fi­cult will it be next time?

How effec­tive will the “It’s a Dif­fer­ent Flu Pan­demic” mes­sage be next time?

The most last­ing dam­age inflicted by the H1N1 flu pan­demic of 2009 may not be the few peo­ple who died from it this time around. It may be the far greater num­ber of peo­ple who die the next time because many of us who lived through this one will not heed the warn­ings next time.