The banner atop the Seattle Times’ front page today was scary: “Swine flu to hit 50% of us?”: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/health/2009730034_flu25.html
The subhed was even scarier: “Swine flu could infect half the U.S. population this fall and winter, hospitalizing up to 1. 8 million people and causing as many as 90,000 deaths.” What followed was a story picked up from the Washington Post on a report issued Monday by a White House advisory panel outlining a “plausible scenario” for a second wave of H1N1 infections. Before you join the Times in getting all worked up over killer pandemics, here’s an update: Today officials at the Centers for Disease Control, which knows flu epidemics better than anyone, cast cold water on the White House report. “Look, if the virus keeps behaving the way it is now, I don’t think anyone here expects anything like 90,000 deaths,” one CDC rep told The New York Times.

To put things in further perspective, consider:

• In 2005 the chief of the United Nations response to H5N1 bird flu projected that it could kill 5 million to 150 million people. So far it’s known to have killed 262.
• The range of H1N1 deaths projected by the current White House panel—30,000 to 90,000—is in line with the average 36,000 deaths each year from run-of-the-mill seasonal flu.
• Something really scary, and preventable: An estimated 100,000 patients die each year at least partly because of MRSA and other infections contracted in hospitals. Many of these could be avoided if hospitals followed basic screening and sanitary procedures, such as making doctors wash their hands. As the Seattle Times itself noted in a special report
in May, docs are the worst violators of rules most of us learn in kindergarten. Hospital-borne infections will still be killing when H1N1 is gone and forgotten. But stemming them shouldn’t be any harder than rushing 159 million doses of swine-flue vaccine to market.