Sooo...a few months ago the world went insane with the whole "swine flu" chaos. Twitter trending topics and Egypt's "Bacon Elimination" solution incited a mindset that H1N1 would bring about the apocalypse or Ragnarök or whatever other "end of the world" scenario you care to imagine.Then, it wasn't that bad.
Cool. Awesome. Pigs won't kill us all. Life will go on.
But it's now Tuesday, October 20th, and I feel like I've read 2400 tweets in the last 2 weeks about H1N1. And nobody is panicking at all.
I'm seeing tweets about schools closing in Sioux Falls. I'm hearing about percentages of college students expected to come down with it in the next few weeks/months.
And we're basically just LOLing it off like it's not even happening.
I'm just curious as to what brought about the fairly drastic change of heart. I'm all about NOT getting worked up for things (mostly because forced panic is really off-putting). I just don't get how the entire world went crazy with swine flu fears a few months ago when almost NOTHING was happening, and now that way more people are coming down with H1N1, everyone's ho-hum about it like people are simply stubbing their toes or biting their cheeks.
To be clear, I'm all about making light of serious (or non-serious) issues whenever possible. Sometimes it's just necessary to maintain some sanity. As one of my favorite rappers, Gift of Gab, puts it, "life is insane, so insanity is a sane life." (I recognize that quote's not entirely fitting, but I think it's an awesome line and I wanted to include it.)
Regardless, I'm just looking for opinions on why this whole situation seems to be so trivial now when H1N1 actually does seem to be detrimentally affecting society at the moment. Is it simply because we now know people don't die instantly or turn into pigs and there's no reason to panic? Or is it just something people aren't taking seriously enough (and probably should)? I'm going with the former, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Image c/o bfishadow.
2 comments:
You know, most people I know that have been "diagnosed" with H1N1 haven't had any tests or anything to confirm that's what they have. And influenza and H1N1 have the same symptoms and spreads in the same way. So that's what makes me not so concerned.
That is true. Mostly people are afraid uselessly and taking unnecessary steps and making things complex for their own. H1N1 now has started to decrease so what we'll have do now is to take necessary steps to prevent it for future.
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