H1N1 News Update

At left is a graph I have been updating since a few weeks into the Swine Flu Pandemic. I was going to post it a few days ago but didn't get around to it (laziness, mainly). Recent headlines from MSNBC and other places have galvanized me into posting quick article.

Most of the information I have been getting has been through the European Center for Disease Control. I stopped getting my information from the CDC in the U.S. because I like the daily, more globally-concerned format of the data from the ECDC better.

The headline that caught my attention was “Swine Flu has sickened 22 million in the U.S.”. My numbers show that serious illnesses from this outbreak should be closer to 2 million, and that's world-wide. I thought, okay, this is a typical wild exaggeration by the media designed to capture my attention. After all, to avoid overworking emergency rooms, they stopped general testing for H1N1 months ago (at the recommendation of the CDC) when a patient showed up with flu-like symptoms, so how could they claim these numbers?

The sub-headline read “CDC: 4,000 in U.S. died, including 540 kids, between April and mid-October”.

4,000?! I “knew” that number was way off because my curve fitting shows roughly 1,000 in the U.S. should have died over the past six months, pretty close to today's ECDC published number of 1,004. But sicknesses can be misinterpreted – deaths cannot. So what is the deal?

Apparently the CDC has been under-reporting the numbers for a while. They knew they were wrong, but, in the absence of the correct numbers, they have been publishing gross underestimates for a while. I am looking forward to tomorrow's ECDC update and how they explain the discrepancy.

FWIW: I am not a conspiracy theorist. Sometimes people just make mistakes or do the best they can with the data they have – this is most likely what is going on here. It would have been nice to know that the error bars were so huge. Even knowing that the data were “plus or minus 100%” would have been a vast improvement.

As I wrote in my previous H1N1 posts, it looks like there are a lot of different data out there that can be used to “prove” anything regarding this outbreak. I am genuinely puzzled and concerned here. I plead genuine ignorance on my part – no passive-aggressive shenanigans or accusations of malfeasance are implied.

Any help to make sense of the situation would be appreciated.