Remember a few months ago when the entire country seemed poised to turn into a bad science fiction movie?
Everywhere you turned the topic was Ebola, and this little known, largely misunderstood disease from Africa appeared ready to overrun the country. Why hadn’t the major drug companies come up with a cure after decades of watching it spread in third world countries? Because there wasn’t enough money in it for them then, was the thinking.
Was the entire country about morph into some sort of Twilight Zone episode?
Could this be the long awaited beginning of the Zombie Apocalypse?
Fash forward to the present where the wall-to-wall news coverage on Ebola has now given way to wall-to-wall questioning of the overblown media coverage that sparked the frenzy.
Nobody’s clamoring for an Ebola shot anymore.
Nope, we’re back to our annual flu frenzy.
Take today’s top headline in the Kansas City Star, “Flu pummels Kansas Citians”
“It’s been years since such a deluge of cases arrived this early, swamping hospitals and doctor’s offices as patients flood in,” the sub head adds. “With the flu now at epidemic levels nationwide, Kansas City is experiencing its most widespread flu season in years.”
Just what we needed, another bogus flu scare.
Or is it?
While returning one of my daughter’s Christmas sweaters at H&M in the Oak Park Mall yesterday, all three clerks at the checkout counter were carrying on about how many people had literally lost it and thrown up on them while going through checkout.
Seriously? I asked.
Oh yeah, the post holiday checkout lines had been long and customers had literally been getting violently ill and throwing up in line and at the counter. Enough to really shake up the checkout clerks.
That’s odd, I thought.
I don’t ever recall anything like this going down. Other than in the news, that is, where no flu bug ever gets a pass when the opportunity to sensationalize it arises.
Remember the Swine Flu pandemic? How about the Asian Flu?
Hey, Oak Park Mall was packed, the lines at H&M and Forever 21 (you can tell where I’ve been shopping) were endlessly long and store staffers were freaking out.
Could this be the Big One?
Just one problem…
Nobody seems to have come up with a sexy name yet for this “deadly influenza strain” that’s sweeping the nation, with “widespread cases” in 36 states.
So until someone does, the working title of this flu epidemic is H3N2.
H3N2 is a strain of influenza A. Time to buy stock in Roche (Tamiflu) and GlaxoSmithKline (Relenza)…..
If it’s not too late…
Here’s an old stockbroker and commodities broker adage:
Buy the rumor, sell the fact.
In other words, by the time the news is public, it’s often too late to buy in because the market has already adjusted based on the expectations. So when the news comes out, the guys who got in early sell and take their profits, driving the market down.
Sounds like something Joe Granville told you.
Picked that one up long before Joe G was on the scene, wild man
Area health departments do not know whether there actually has been a spike in flu cases or because more sites and medical providers are now reporting more people diagnosed with the virus compared to previous seasons. It could possibly be a combination of the two as well. Who knows? News stations are fear-mongering, of course.
News media will always fear-monger…it’s what they do.
However, listening and talking for 10 minutes with the checkout guys at H&M aghast at all of the people getting violently ill right before their eyes and worry aloud of what they feel they’re sure to catch, was a first for me.
Next thing I knew, there came the headline
Did you ask the chicky at Watson’s what she thought of ze svine flu?
When I have the flu, I dont tell anyone.
Sounds boring, Libertarian…
Actually from what the H&M dudes were saying, the customers with the flu weren’t so much talking about it as they were acting it out…throwing up all over the counter and in line
I was hoping Ebola would wipe a billion or two off the face of the earth and got severely disappointed.
We need a good disease to do a little purging- where is a good bubonic plague when you need one?
+1