I don't recall any leftists crying during the H1N1 pandemic, when Obama golfed and the Wookie remodeled and gardened while Americans suffered and died.
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On June 11, 2009, the World Health Organization declared that the swine flu virus we now simply call H1N1 had indeed triggered a pandemic, the first time in four decades a new flu virus had emerged and was triggering wide-scale illness around the globe.
Since it started circulating in the spring of 2009, H1N1 infected about 100 million Americans, killing about 75,000 and sending 936,000 to the hospital, the CDC estimates.
A decade onward, the experience of H1N1 is a reminder that it’s impossible to know from the get-go how a pandemic will play out.
A study published in 2013 suggested between 123,000 and 200,000 people globally may have died as a result of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.
But just looking at the number of deaths masks the full impact of the pandemic, because the people who died were younger than those influenza normally claims. (The elderly, whose immune systems had seen viruses similar to this one long ago, weathered the pandemic pretty well.) A group of researchers who analyzed the deaths based on years of life lost concluded the pandemic’s toll in the United States was at least as bad as an average H3N2 flu season and potentially as severe as the 1968 pandemic.
That picture of the 2009 pandemic was only painted after the fact. At the time, the WHO faced pressure from some key member countries not to declare H1N1 a pandemic at all.
In the U.S., the Health and Human Services Department estimated in July 2009 that 120 million doses would be available by October. By late October, only 17 million doses had been shipped — and fewer than that had been administered.
So will things work better the next time there’s a pandemic? Without knowing how much severe illness the outbreak will cause, it’s almost impossible to venture a guess. It’s worth noting, though, that many of the knock-on effects that a disruptive event like a bad pandemic could cause — the stress it would place on the always fragile supply of key medications, for instance — remain as threatening today as they did a decade ago.
https://www.statnews.com/2019/06/11/h1n1-swine-flu-10-years-later/
Nothing out of touch with that....
