Quote Originally Posted by joe13 View Post
So in the local paper this morning there was an article about norovirus hitting hard in the neighboring county to where I live; I literally live right on the border of the two counties. They said its a strain from Australia that people haven't been exposed to before, and that it has been hitting the area very badly. They haven't found an outbreak of it yet in my county, but as I live right next to it I know it will hit my area first. It's making me very paranoid and I'm not sure there is anything I can do. I've already heard of a few friends and people in my area becoming very ill and it could have been the virus. I hate this time of year!!
The press have this way of blowing everything out of proportion. Take the Norovirus in Britain at the moment. It is estimated that for everyone 1 person that gets confirmed norovirus (ie: laborotory test), there are 298 people who have it that is unconfirmed. Therefore there have been 3900 confirmed cases, which means that they believe 1,100,000 people have been struck down with it. In Britain that is 1 in every 67 people. However I know of nearly 200 people and out of those only 2 have confirmed they they have had it. Meaning that its more likely to be 700,000 people who have had it.

What I am trying to get at is that the press need to sell papers and saying that an outbreak of a disease has hit million sells more papers than one person struck down with vomiting bug.