“The rising numbers of swine flu cases mean trying to contain the virus is no longer an option, the government says. Andy Burnham, the health secretary in England, said: ‘The national focus will be on treating the increasing numbers affected by swine flu. Cases are doubling every week and on this trend we could see over 100,000 cases per day by the end of August’”.

In my day job recently I’ve been doing a bit of project planning, using existing numbers to predict future numbers. Let’s play with these swine flu numbers a little, shall we?

On June 10 the number of reported swine flu cases was 800.

Meaning that at the reported exponential infection rate, by June 17 there were 1,600 cases, June 24 3,200, July 1 6,400, by July 8 there will be 12,800, July 15 25,600, July 22 51,200, August 1 102,400, August 8 204,800, August 15 409,600, August 22 819,200, and ‘the end of August’ gives us 1,638,400 cases. We’re of course not counting the people who no longer have the illness by the end of August, because news reporting hasn’t been telling us how well and quickly people have been recovering, just how they’ve been succumming.

So, lets say now that by the end of August, we tail off the exponential infection rate and just keep with the linear infection rate of 100,000 per day. That’s a million people every ten days, or three million people per month.

October will in that case give us 4.5 million cases, November, 7.5 million cases, December, 10.5 million cases, January, 13.5 million cases. Or a full fifth of the whole UK population.

Scaremongering?

“Britain’s Got Talent runner-up Susan Boyle has been taken to The Priory Clinic in London with exhaustion. The Scottish singing sensation is said to be drained after losing out to dance group Diversity on the ITV1 show”.

I had managed to avoid the whole of Britain’s Got Talent until where I was last weekend on saturday night a friend decided to show some of the YouTube clips.

Frankly, I thought the winners Diversity – whilst clever & talented dancers – were quite dull as a performance, and that Susan Boyle, whilst she could moderately well hold a note (though the opening of her performance of Memory was rather shaky), was no better than practically any singer to have come out of any national, or even regional level music college. The notes were coming out, the tone was OK, but there was no personality behind the singing – a good performer makes the piece their own. A mediocre performer might as well be a pianola.

But as for the current story of her being taken to hospital because of not being able to cope with the stress of not winning – well, harsh as it might seem to say so, that’s just tough I’m afraid. If the upset of coming second is enough to make her go to pieces, then she’s just not suited to a career in performing arts; ‘coming second’, knockbacks, rejections, and harsh criticism are facts of life in that world.

Performing arts is a stressful world; like it or not, you need to be mentally hard to cope in it. Most people who are successful in it have had a long preparation for it, in most cases since children – they cut their stress teeth by being sick all over the bishop at the cathedral in the primary school diocesan concert, by being part of the National Festival of Music for Youth concerts, by doing their grades, and by doing the music festival competition circuit. Stress is, as they say, part of the gig.

Susan Boyle had her two weeks of fame – if it was her dream to be a professional singer, she should be grateful for what she got. But just because it was her dream to be a professional singer, that doesn’t mean she has a constitutional right to have had that dream turn into reality. Whether she was mentally fit for it or not.

Nick Booth has written an excellent article in response to (although it actually predated it) a consultation Birmingham City Council are currently running about how to develop its Press Office service.

It’s sufficiently general that it works as good advice for any organisation thinking about how to modernise its public relations activity; indeed, it serves as excellent advice on how news organisations and magazines themselves might adapt to the reality of the modern world.

New cases of the deadly swine flu virus have been confirmed as far afield as New Zealand and Israel, as the UN warns it cannot be contained.

The US, Canada, Spain and Britain confirmed cases earlier but no deaths have been reported outside Mexico, where the virus was first reported.

From the way the news media – including online / social media sources – are reporting this developing story, anybody would think the world is on the brink of Terry Nation’s Survivors becoming a reality; the BBC Radio 4 Today programme headline for the item declares “Up to 40% of population could become ill“, with one commentator in the item reminding us that the country could literally grind to a standstill as not only the people being ill being off work, but also the people staying at home to look after them; and emergency planning teams of local councils issuing statements about how resiliant they are.

As of writing, in Mexico – where the outbreak started – the current total number of confirmed cases is 20, with 152 described as ‘probable’, and a further 1,614 people ‘under observation’.

In the rest of the world, where there are as yet no confirmed deaths:

Putting those numbers in perspective, the populations of those countries are:

Putting the numbers further in perspective, flu epidemics occur every year all over the world, and the human tragedy is that hundreds of thousands of people die of it every year with tens of millions of people – globally – dying in roughly three pandemics per century as a new strain emerges.

Tens of millions of deaths is clearly a serious human tragedy, but in the meanwhile, 884,000,000 people worldwide lack access to clean drinking water, with 3,900 children per day – 1,423,500 per year – dying of diarrhea alone.

Over the last four years we’ve been being told we were all going to die of Bird Flu, and in November 2002 we were told we were all going to die of SARS.

I think clean drinking water is a more pressing concern.

(Source link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8022437.stm)

“A musical based on Jade Goody’s life is being created, a former business partner and friend of the late reality TV star has confirmed.

Danny Hayward, who is in charge of the project, said he is planning to hold open auditions to fill the lead role of the 27-year-old herself”.

Oh for crying out loud & the love of all that is sensible.

That is all.

(From BBC news)

“The Bullring Shopping Centre was today revealed as one of 26 possible terror targets in Birmingham and the West Midlands. The report warned that Birmingham was the first British city targeted by al-Qaida, after jobless waiter Moinul Abedin planned to bomb the city centre”.

Apart from the fact that it doesn’t take Columbo to work out that it’s pretty likely that if a terrorist was going to be planning an attack in Birmingham, the Bullring is about as high profile a target as it gets, the casual reader might be especially alarmed at reading this, thinking twice about whether to nip down to Selfridges today for their Yo Sushi! lunch.

That is, if they hadn’t read a few lines further down the page:

“Abedin, aged 27, was arrested in November 2000 and jailed for 20 years after being convicted of doing an act with intent to cause an explosion”.

ie, the ‘revelation’ that the Bullring was on a list of terror targets is that the list was compiled – and the compiler convicted – when the target in question was just about to be demolished anyway, a full three years before the present building which most people would be fearing for was opened.

Here in the social media world, we tend to call that sloppy journalism.

The person who actually coined the term Winterval has been in touch with Andy Mabbett:

I am continually fascinated that the term Winterval, ever caused (and still does) such a furore.

Quite simply, as Head of events at that time, we needed a vehicle which could cover the marketing of a whole season of events – Diwali (festival of Lights), Christmas lights switch on, BBC Children in Need, Aston Hall by Candlelight, Chinese New year, New Years eve etc. Also a season that included theatre shows and open air ice rink, Frankfurt open air Christmas market and the Christmas seasonal retail offer. Christmas, called Christmas! and its celebration, lay at the heart of Winterval.

Political correctness was never the reasoning behind Winterval, but yes it was intended to be inclusive (which is no bad thing to my mind) and a brand to which other initiatives could be developed as part of The Winterval offer in order to sell the City at a time when all cities are competing against each other for the seasonal trade.

Read the rest of his explanation on Andy’s blog!