According to CNN, a “nonpartisan, nonprofit organization” (there are such things?) called the Trust for America’s Health has issued a report that not only suggests that a flu pandemic in the US could cause a recession, it quantifies its predictions with numbers. For instance, they say that a pandemic could kill 2.25 million people and make 87.75 million people miss work for three weeks (a whopping 263.25 person-week loss!). They predict that the loss would cause the US gross domestic product to drop by $683 billion, or 5.5 percent (in contrast, in an average year the GDP crows by 3.5 percent).

My recent bought with the flu certainly caused me a personal recession and hurt my productivity.

I wonder if their report deals with secondary and tertiary effects such as property values, the increase in business for hospitals and gravediggers and the increase in sales of bogus medication over the Internet.

Via: Study: Flu outbreak in U.S. could spark recession - CNN.com
[tags]pandemic, economy, deaths, flu, bird flu, avian flu, h5n1, recession[/tags]

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