The article I read was "U.S. Reaction to Swine Flu: Apt and Lucky".This article is from The New York Times and was written by Donald G. McNeil Jr. and was published on January 2, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/02/health/02flu.html?ref=health . This article is about how the reaction to H1N1 by Americans was better than expected and even though we reacted excellently, luck played a huge part. This article talks about the national reaction by Americans and the good and bad decisions made by federal officials during the outbreak of H1N1. Back in August, an estimate was made that at least 30,000 to 90,000 people would die from the swine flu. Since August, only 10,000 people have been killed by H1N1. This shows our country that swine flu was not as bad as we believed it would be and that we did a good job of keeping everyone healthy and vaccinated. But we did make some mistakes and these mistakes let Americans know what are weaknesses were during the H1N1 outbreak. One mistake was that we should have been able to spot H1N1 earlier than we did but we did not have good cooperation with Mexico. Another mistake made by the government was making only 30 million vaccine doses by October, when we were told there would be 160 million doses. The government did make a lot of good decisions involving the swine flu. There were many rumors evolving around the Swine Flu, but the C.D.C. and the World Health Organization were always on the top of their game. They were able to shut down every rumor, which helped stop fears about the Swine Flu from Americans.
Donald McNeil wrote this article in a positive way. He agrees with the fact that America did a good job of handling the Swine flu. This article shows readers that things could have been a lot worst if we had not responded to H1N1 in the ways we did. He is very informal and uses mostly quotes and facts from different people to get the message across. The message is that America reacted to H1N1 in many good ways and that the ways we reacted showed us a little about our country. He says, "The outbreak highlighted many national weaknesses." He goes on to list the weaknesses but then he goes into detail with quotes from many health experts on the things that we did right. I do not think that there is any bias of the author. He is simply giving information on how we reacted to the Swine Flu. McNeil gives many quotes and statistics from both sides of the Swine Flu. He shows the ways in which we reacted to the Swine Flu excellently and how we reacted to it badly. I believe that this article is informative and I was convinced that we did do a good job reacting to H1N1.
This article is centered around Swine Flu and that is why I decided to choose it. We did public health announcements on Swine Flu and many of the things that we focused on were talked about in this article. Back in the summer and early fall, I remember watching the news and learning about the Swine Flu. I feared it, like many people did, since all of the information we were being told about H1N1 made it seem like a lot of people were going to die. This article showed me that the Swine Flu did not turn out to be what we all thought it was going to be. I also learned that our government did a very good job in reacting to the Swine Flu. Overall, I think this is a really good article to read because it shows people the things that we did wrong in reacting to the Swine Flu and the things we did right and we can learn from our reactions.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I like how this article does not just talk about the facts of the Swine Flu and what we have already heard. But it tries to lessen the dramatization about it by telling the significant number of deaths was lower than expected. It was also interesting to read about what the government could have done differently to detect the H1N1 earlier.
ReplyDeleteI agree that in a situation like this the worst thing people could have done is panicked. That would have made matters a whole lot worse than they were. What I don't understand is how the article said that there were 10,000 people who died of H1N1 flu this year. Those people all must have had underlying medical problems because it is just the flu, and most healthy individuals do not die from it. It is very lucky that scientists were able to make a vaccine very quickly otherwise a lot more people would have acquired the virus.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed this article very much so. I believe that the panic did do most of the damage, however i also believe that the panic level was not nearly as bad as it could have been. I also would like to agree with Erin, I love how this article gave alot of new and solid facts about H1N1, copared to many of the other articles that come up on google when "H1N1" is searched, and all these articles come up that just repeat the same facts, about how it all came from Mexico. "Since August, only 10,000 people have been killed by H1N1." this fact shocked me! Even though the deaths werent as much as expected, 10,000 is still a large number.
ReplyDelete