It’s
that time of year again, but it came five weeks early. The flu season is back,
and causing problems for thousands of people across the country. On Monday, 11
Illinois hospitals had to go on hospital bypass status, meaning they could not handle
any more patients without life-threatening illnesses, said Melaney Arnold,
spokeswoman for the Illinois Department of Public Health. In Boston, mayor Thomas Menino has just
declared a state of emergency in his city, with eighteen deaths across the
state from the flu. Although the flu may seem harmless to everything but a
human being, it isn’t.
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According to the Center for Disease Control, average
seasonal flu outbreaks costs U.S. employers $10.4 billion in direct costs of
hospitalization and outpatient, not including the lost productivity of the sick
employee. With this statistic, it begs the question, what will happen to the
economy if the flu season worsens? A major flu outbreak in the United States
could put a lot of strain on the already struggling U.S. economy .
If the United States were to experience a pandemic
across the country, researchers are the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention calculate that deaths in the United States could reach 207,000
people, and could cost the economy up to $166 billion, or about 1.5% of the Gross
Domestic Product (GDP). This could hurt the entire country as a whole as well
as particularly impacting states with high levels of tourism and entertainment
the most. During health pandemics, thousands of people choose to stay at home
rather than expose themselves to germs at highly populated places, like
airports, train stations and big cities.
So, is there anything the United States can do to
stop the widespread spread of the flu? Can the United States do anything to
prepare the economy if this flu season turns into a pandemic?
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