Sarcasm with a touch of irony.

(I am regarding it as a pretty serious event myself, but I am not counting it as a species extinction event.)

There really isn't anything new of substance to report since yesterday except the current tally of the cases, which is not as critical as actually identifying who is getting infected. It's basically a waiting game at the moment as health officials track down cases and their contacts and labs do their work, which both take time. The lab testing can take days to get back a result, which is why there's such a disparity between the number of suspected and confirmed cases, especially from Mexico.

It's not so worrying--or as worrying, I guess I should say--if the tally keeps climbing as long as all the cases either went to Mexico or were people who had close contact with someone who had been in Mexico recently, like family members, close friends, or classmates. If that's the case, then concentrated efforts to minimize further transmission would likely contain it and let the various outbreaks burn out on their own. Basically similar to what happens when there's a flare up of meningitis at your local college campus but health officials can keep it from spreading to the wider community at large.

Things go to the next level if we start discovering a lot of random people infected in New York or San Diego and these other places with little or no apparent exposure to anyone recently in Mexico or one of their close contacts. At that point, it becomes apparent that the flu has the ability to spread efficiently throughout a community and not just among close contacts. But even then, it could still remain relatively mild and benign and not end up killing many people at all.

Someone was saying yesterday or Sunday on the TV, which I agree with--that at this point, it's something we should let the public health officials freak out over, but it's not yet at the point where most of us need to freak out over.

As I pointed out a lot of the numbers being bandied around are less firm than they appear to be.

A lot of the reports from poorer nations and Mexico in particular are still classified as ILI, Influenza, Like, Illness. Some unknown number have a flu-like disease with muscle pain, fever and coughing. The very worse cases, and hypochondriacs, are showing up at hospitals. This throws off the count both ways.

Even when it is pretty well known that a person has the swine flu if they die there is still a question of how to list the death. In LA two died that had swine flu but one had lymphoma and the proximate cause of death for the other was, pending death certificate, pneumonia.

Determining the actual cause and assigning blame is not as simple as just counting the bodies.

On the up side, as one commentator pointed out, 'as long as you can still count the bodies it isn't really a pandemic'.

Count them heck, so long as you still have enough people left to bury the dead it isn't really a pandemic.

What is really concerning me is that it would appear the outbreak is only a 4-6 weeks old and yet it would appear there is already death rates figuring in the hundreds. If you assume that the period of time for the influenza virus takes is approximately 7-10 days or possibly 14 days before symptoms are servere enough for people to present for medical treatment. (A newly wed couple here in Scotland returned from Mexico on their honeymoon and it was five days to a week before becoming symptomatic, in which they had returned to their jobs over that period, where they could have unknowningly infected dozens of others, who will present their symptoms in the next week or so).

If you then take into account the geometric rate of person to person infection etc, then the 200 deaths as reported in some media circles with possibly 1000 infections giving a mortality rate of possibly double digit percentages, then this is truely frightning especially considering the time constant of the expansion of deaths. i.e it may well take 2-3 weeks before the initial infection of the virus to death.

It may well be the case that in the next 1-2 weeks the death rates could by in the thousands across most of the globe and tens of thousands by the end of May.

It's far more likely that people who now know about the virus will take steps to avoid getting it and those who have already been infected will be treated with one of the several courses of treatment that are effective in countering the virus.

It's not like there's no effective treatment modalities out there. And needless to say, the chances of people NOT being becoming aware of the risks grow smaller all the time with the use of things like the Web, social networking sites, Twitter, et al.

JohnE

Actually, the news that bothers me - one of my daughters teachers is a confirmed case of swine flu

(I live right at Ground Zero for it - that NYC High school? less than 1/4 mile from here - the NYC school for the autistic kids? about 1/2 mile)

More news.
"Pig industry responds to swine flu outbreak" (28 Apr 2009)
http://www.pigprogress.net/news/pig-industry-responds-to-swine-flu-outbreak-id2886.html

Swine flu is not from pigs!
http://www.pigprogress.net/news/oie-swine-flu-not-traced-back-to-pigs-id2891.html

First US death in Texas, young child.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/51913.php