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1) As someone already pointed out, our technological preparedness is much more advanced than in 1918, even if we can't make a vaccine until we get ahold of the actual deadly virus which doesn't exist yet.

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True, but we're also much more urbanized than in 1918, especially in the developing world. Higher population density means faster spread and higher infection rates. Also, air travel will make this spread all over the globe much more quickly than in 1918. I would not be surprised if this resulted in a higher % of the population being killed (potentially as many as 500 million), with Africa and Asia being hit hardest.

One mitigating factor is that, in 1918, there was no government warning. In fact, the US government gave people reassurances that everything would be fine. No one really knew what was coming, and there were no quarantines. We may get similar obstruction from SE Asian countries, but the population in developed countries will generally know what's happening within a week, probably.

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2) There are many levels between an outbreak among birds and a full scale pandemic and so it would stand to reason that it could stop at the 2nd last or 3rd last levels with high probabilities, even if we haven't experienced that before. It's like having experienced a category 5 hurricane in your lifetime but no category 1,2,3, or 4. You still have to assume that the lower levels are more likely even though your one and only data point is a 5.

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Previous pandemics in the 40's and 60's (?) have been caused by viral gene swapping in pigs, and resulted in less virulent strains. The category 5 storm is the mutation directly from bird to human. Based on genetic analysis, there only need to be a few dozen mutations in the current avian strain for this to happen.

Or, now that the genetic sequence has been published, it would only take a dedicated and moderately sophisticated misanthrope to engineer the pandemic virus. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] Toodles!