Saturday, May 30, 2009

Swine Flu: The South American league table updated

Here we go with the updated table, with a total of 398 confirmed cases (and plenty more to come, be in no doubt).

click to enlarge

You can't fault South Americans for generosity, as they've now managed to spread the swine flu gift around to all major nations in the continent. In the last 48 hours the first confirmed cases have been registered in Uruguay, Paraguay (a single family and one of their neighbours), Bolivia and Venezuela.

Meanwhile Chile, being all competitive and that, always seems to want to be top nation in everything down here. The biggest move has been made by Argentina which has shot up to 80 cases in quicktime. Between them Chile and Argentina have managed to hog 2/3rds of confirmed cases down here. Notable has been the lack of progress made by Colombia, as it registered some of the first cases in the region; they must be doing something right, methinks.

Another factor is, of course, the weather. Draw a line through the continent at Quito and anything below is now approaching winter (late June/early July is the coldest moment), but more importantly if you draw a line just below the top of Argentina that kind of cuts Paraguay in half and finishes at Sao Paolo, Brazil, anything below is out of the tropics zone and has cold winter weather in the same way that you guys up there experience from November to February. Also, areas of higher altitude countries such as Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador will always be more prone to these things.

So are you thinking what I'm thinking? Yep, come November the North has a problem.