So many people have fallen sick with influenza in California that pharmacies have run out of flu medicines, emergency rooms are packed, and the death toll is rising higher than in previous years.
Health officials said Friday that 27 people younger than 65 have died of the flu in California since October, compared with three at the same time last year. Nationwide and in California, flu activity spiked sharply in late December and continues to grow…
The flu season is typically worst around February, but can reach its height anytime from October to April. Though influenza had only only killed three Californians at this time last year, it had taken 68 lives by the end of February, according to state data.
Many California doctors, however, contend that the recent surge has been unusually severe.
“Rates of influenza are even exceeding last year, and last year was one of the worst flu seasons in the last decade,” said Dr. Randy Bergen, clinical lead of the flu vaccine program for Kaiser Permanente in Northern California.
State health officials said Friday that there was no region of the state where people were being spared from the flu.
In Riverside and San Bernardino counties, ambulance services have been severely strained because of the number of flu calls coming in, local health officials said.
Plus, emergency rooms are so crowded that ambulances arriving at hospitals can’t immediately unload their patients, so they’re unable to leave for incoming 911 calls, said Jose Arballo Jr., spokesman for the Riverside County Department of Public Health.
“The ambulances have to wait … and if they’re waiting there, they can’t be out on calls,” Arballo said…
CVS spokeswoman Amy Lanctot said increased demand for Tamiflu in California may have led to some stores being temporarily out of stock. Other pharmacies reported that they were running low on the medicine or were out completely.
“They’re all on back order right now,” said Talia Dimaio, a pharmacy clerk at Rancho Park Compounding Pharmacy in West L.A. “We can’t get it.”
Bob Purcell, spokesman for the San Francisco-based pharmaceutical company Genentech, which makes Tamiflu, said there isn’t a national shortage of the medicine, suggesting that pharmacists’ shelves were emptied this week by a sudden surge in demand.
Interesting that the last two years might be part of a trend. My suspicion is K-shifts are partly a swinging of the r-pendulum back, so when you go r, the K-shift is inevitable.
But I also suspect that in a stable environment humans could artificially drive things r for a long, long time. In the real world, I suspect we artificially drive things r far beyond the point the stable environment could sustain them, until an environmental change kicks in and suddenly snaps us back into K with the full force of the environmental pressures we had been holding at bay. That environmental change could be anything, solar activity shifts, sudden geological changes produced by movement of the solar system through an area of the galaxy that somehow affects the planet – I have no idea.
But once that K-shift starts I think food production, even in nature, diminishes just enough to increase stress on various organisms and those stressed organisms become susceptible to infections they would otherwise have shrugged off. As those infections cook in now weakened hosts, they begin to adapt to the immune responses and develop the genes of techniques to overcome them, and as that happens, pathogens become stronger.
The end result is, in the K-shift the horsemen roll together. Shortage produces plague, plague produces economic shortages, Shortages produce war, and war enhances stress and produces more plague. It is all interrelated, and that is exactly the environment we may be heading into, perhaps with a mini-Ice Age on top of it.
So when I see two years of the flu getting stronger each year, I file away, we may not have seen anything yet. Wait until year three and year four.
You don’t want to be running from the horsemen.
r/K Theory Part 1 - r/K Theory Part 2 - r/K Theory Part 3