I have now uploaded the swine flu data to a Swivel data set. I will update this data set periodically and so the rankings in the chart below should stay reasonably up to date.
Data sources: Guardian Data Blog, CIA World Fact Book.
UPDATE: A number of people have told me that in a number of places, including Victoria and much of the US, testing for swine flu has ceased. This means that the “lab confirmed” swine flu count will become increasingly meaningless over time, so I have decided to stop updating this data.
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@safzoro relax! In most recent data, we’re still 3rd: http://bit.ly/A12yU #swineflu
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
Yay, looks like Australia will take out the piggy bronze: http://bit.ly/1zjHo8
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
As someone who was forcebly restrained from attending his workplace on account of a runny nose, I think there are several aspects of this current hysteria that have not been thought out very well:
1) Since when do we start quarantining people for influenza? Isn’t there an outbreak every year? Has quaraniting been tested before? Does it work?
2) Is this just a bunch of Stalinist public health physicians exercising their personal fantasies about people control?
3) Now that avian flu doesn’t look like it’s going to transmit human to human, is everyone promoting the current state of fear desperately trying to prolong their existence in useless government run sinecures?
4) No one seems to be dying much from this H1N1 strain (much more that usual anyway), what is the economic cost of the social control constraints that are being implemented?
5) How many representatives are there on the steering committees that are drumming up the hysteria have received largesse from the makers of Tamiflu
My advice is duck and cover
Tristam
This comment was originally posted on http://www.stubbornmule.net/)“>A Stubborn Mule’s Perspective
Hi Sean,
I share your penchant for league tables expressed in proportion to population — in 2000 I did a similar analysis for the Sydney Olympics for my own interest. There is, of course, always a tension between proportional and absolute measures, with arguments favouring each. In the case of swine flu infections, relative measures seem to make the most sense. For olympic medals, this is less clear.
Interestingly, Roger Penrose has recently been touting “The Penrose Rule” invented by his father, which advocates giving countries voting weights according to the square-root of their populations, in institutions such as the UN. He discussed this idea on the BBC’s The Forum in April, mentioning the statistical justifications for it. One can see this as akin to the role the Cox, Ingersoll & Ross model of option pricing plays in being intermediate between a model of absolute deviations (say Vasicek) and one of proportional changes (like Black’s model).
So it would be interesting to see how these league tables look when expressed relative to the square-root of population.
Cheers,
Mark
This comment was originally posted on http://www.stubbornmule.net/)“>A Stubborn Mule’s Perspective
@Mark: the square root idea is fascinating! I’ll look into it and maybe even write a post on the topic. In the meantime, here is a list of the current top six countries ranked by infections/population:
1 Chile
2 Canada
3 Australia
4 Panama
5 US
6 Mexico
and the top six ranked by infections/sqrt(population) with the original ranking by population in brackets:
1 (5) US
2 (2) Canada
3 (6) Mexico
4 (1) Chile
5 (3) Australia
6 (10) UK
I’ll have to think through the significance of the change in ranking.
This comment was originally posted on http://www.stubbornmule.net/)“>A Stubborn Mule’s Perspective
Interesting stuff. Did you hear that there’s a new strain which is resistant to the anti-flu drugs? Tamiflu etc? Found a really good website for tracking it’s progress, seems to be updated every hour or so… http://www.swinefludeaths.co.uk.
This comment was originally posted on http://www.stubbornmule.net/)“>A Stubborn Mule’s Perspective