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Mortality Estimates - Why aren't the total world estimates used except in the introduction?
The WHO estimates for total deaths is used once at the beggining of the article, then pretty much ignored after that. The figures of fourteen and eighteen thousand deaths are quoted multiple times as being fact. Which it is. Some tens of thousands of people definitely died of the H1N1 strain. But those are only the people in the developed world who died close enough to labs and doctors to be recorded, and we are essentially misrepresenting the deaths of around two hundred and fifty thousand people mostly in africa and southern asia. That's wrong. We can't just be citing the figures of deaths from the developed world and saying that those are the only ones that count.
The WHO is a reliable enough source to be trusted to tell us how many lab tested cases there were of the H1N1 strain, but not to estimate the total number of people who died? That's madness.
We need to be honest and open in this regard, and report what sources we trust are telling us. They are telling us that outside the developed world the 2009 flu killed fourteen times as many people as are being reported on this page. The people reading the page can understand that estimates aren't perfect, and as long as it it's clear that they are estimates but from reliable sources they can better understand exactly why the 2009 pandemic was an event worthy of note.
As it stands if you don't see the estimate quoted in the opening section then you are lead to believe that less than twenty thousand people died the world over and that as a result 2009 outbreak is scarecly worthy of note; barely contributing to the world wide flu season and that is absolutely not the case. While reports in the press at the time were overblown, there certainly were a lot of people getting sick and a significant number dying. How can we justify just ignoring them because they didn't have the good manners to live in countries with a good enough health care system to run the tests?
