A big problem is that the last two "pandemics" were declared early on to be so, but did not end up being pandemics. That seems to indicate that the trigger crit

A big problem is that the last two "pandemics" were declared early on to be so, but did not end up being pandemics. That seems to indicate that the trigger criteria or observable data for declaring a pandemic virus were inadequate for at least those two cases. On the other hand, I'm sympathetic towards public health agencies, because to effectively head off a pandemic you have to detect it and take action early. However, if you're going to err on the side of caution, there are going to be a lot of false alarms, which in turn is going to lead to public relations fatigue about the whole issue. Then you're going to have a problem mustering a response if a pandemic actually comes up. It's a difficult problem. One suspicion I have that leads to this problem is that we've never before had the tools to so easily & rapidly track the progress of a particular strains of flu virus - I suspect that really we just don't know about what the range of characteristics about the transmission rates really are to this level of detail, so really we don't precisely know how to accurately forecast if a virus at early stages will lead to a pandemic.