Month: November 2009

The 72 hour “free phone service” experiment has failed. Only about 1 in 3 outgoing calls actually have worked. Call quality is terrible. Frequent drops. Sometimes the line will start doing a “fast busy” in the middle of the conversation. About 1 in 3 times I reboot my ATA it just flat-out can’t connect Gizmo.

But the most frustrating thing is Google Voice’s “Call” interface doesn’t tell you what’s going on. It just says “Now connecting…”, which would be fine if it actually connected. When there’s an error, or your phone never rings, you’re left there wondering what the hell happened.

New data released last week from the CDC:

• 22M infections in the US so far
• 98,000 hospitalizations
• 3900 deaths

Therefore:

• 0.445% of the population who gets swine flu requires hospitalization, or about 1 in 220
• 0.0177% of people who get swine flu die from it, or about 1 in 5600

Children only:

• 8M infections
• 36,000 hospitalizations
• 540 deaths

Therefore:

• 0.45% of children who get swine flu require hospitalization, or about 1 in 220
• 0.00675% of children who get swine flu die from it, or about 1 in 15,000

I wonder how they come up the 22M and 8M. I was sick with something bad last week. I thought, “no way it’s swine flu.” But I looked up the symptoms for swine flu, and I actually met the symptoms. (Which are basically, “it’s like the flu”). It wasn’t until seeing these numbers I thought, “well maybe I did have swine flu”. There are 304M people in the US, so 7% of the population has already gotten it.

If you go through the old CDC data it appears the flu typically peaks in February, so we might be a ways from hitting the peak of H1N1.