Cobbling Together a Crisis

Even as the swine-flu epidemic has peaked.

By Michael Fumento
http://www.nationalreview.com/
19 November 2009

‘Swine flu has killed 540 kids, sickened 22 million Americans,” screams USA Today’s page-one headline, with a sub-head proclaiming, “CDC: Cases, Deaths are Unprecedented.” “Swine flu cases in the U.S. are rising at the fastest pace for influenza in four decades,” breathlessly declares the lede of a Bloomberg News article. Another article’s title refers to a “national swine flu spike.”

Scary stuff — but it’s phony. It’s actually a desperate effort to distract from an alarmist media world’s greatest nightmare: that the epidemic has peaked.

The latest hype is based on the new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that 22 million Americans have been infected with H1N1 swine flu from the outbreak’s early-April beginning through October 17. (Though the word “sickened” hardly applies, since about a third of cases are wholly asymptomatic.) Of those, the agency says 4,000 have died.

Put in perspective, through a comparison with garden-variety seasonal flu, these figures aren’t at all alarming; and the CDC’s report indeed provides seasonal-flu data. But perspective is the alarmists’ enemy. So, instead, reporters simply cut, rearranged, and pasted press-conference statements from unofficial swine-flu “czarina” Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the CDC’s Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

Thus Schuchat’s reference to “unprecedented” had nothing to do with absolute numbers of infections or deaths, but referred just to the time of year at which they were occurring. That’s because swine flu spreads more easily at warmer temperatures. Normally, flu doesn’t get into stride until early January and then peaks in mid-February. The figures themselves are far from “unprecedented.” The CDC estimates 5 to 20 percent of the population (15 to 60 million people) gets the flu in a typical year, with almost all cases occurring from January through April. That’s as many as 15 million a month, compared to 22 million spread over half a year.

What’s truly unprecedented about this swine flu is its incredible mildness. The CDC estimates seasonal flu annually kills 36,000 Americans, again spread over four months. That compares to 4,000 swine-flu deaths in the current cycle. The seasonal-flu death rate therefore ranges from 0.06 percent to 0.24 percent, while the CDC estimate puts it at only 0.0182 percent for swine flu. So seasonal flu is three to twelve times deadlier per case.

The media also used Schuchat to invoke the horrific Spanish flu of 1918-19, in which about 675,000 Americans died out of a much smaller U.S. population. CNN.com paraphrased Schuchat, saying: “The prevalence of flu cases is higher than at any time since the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.” Utterly false. Her only reference to the calamity was “what we’re seeing with this H1N1 virus is nowhere near the severity of the 1918 pandemic.” Apparently something got lost in the translation.

And just as swine flu arrived early, so too must it peak earlier. Indeed, it already has — as data readily available on the CDC FluView website and elsewhere, and just as readily ignored, show. The accompanying graph from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows a sharp decline in both new deaths and hospitalizations.

Even more telling, though, is that the bottom has fallen out of new infections. Test samples doctors have submitted to CDC-monitored surveillance laboratories went from 26,000 two weeks ago to 21,000 last week to just 13,000 at present. Further, progressively fewer of those samples have actually shown flu. Overall, the number of positive samples has plunged over 60 percent in just two weeks.

But could these indicators start to shoot up again? Not likely. According to Farr’s law, named after 19th-century epidemiologist John Farr, infectious disease patterns follow a bell curve. As the disease first plucks low-hanging fruit, infections rise rapidly, but as fruit gets harder to reach the rate of increase slows – until, finally, infections start falling off either to zero or to a low “endemic” level.

Back in 1989, I wrote that Farr’s law indicated that U.S. AIDS cases had already peaked. For my troubles I was called — to use the mildest of the epithets — a nutcase. Somehow, we were told, AIDS was going to go on infecting and infecting, killing and killing. There were predictions of more dead Americans than there were people in the U.S. population. These projections obviously simply ignored Farr’s law – and also flunked the common-sense test. And Farr’s law applies in the current case, too. Since Australia is in the southern hemisphere, its flu season has ended. Almost all cases were swine flu and there was no vaccine. And Australia’s epidemic curve indicates that, yes, once swine flu cases started going down they kept dropping.

No, the bell wasn’t symmetrical, and we shouldn’t expect it to be here in the U.S. either. Expect a long “tail” extending to the end of normal flu season in April. In other words, the fact that infections have peaked doesn’t mean we’ve necessarily seen half of them yet.

And that should actually prove to be good news. Consider that even without a vaccine, Australia along with New Zealand reported significantly fewer flu deaths than in normal years. Why? As I mentioned above, the newly released CDC estimate of infections and deaths in the U.S. indicates that seasonal flu is anywhere from three to twelve times deadlier than swine flu. Other data, including data from New York City, also indicate that swine flu is far milder. Yet swine flu spreads more easily, essentially outcompeting seasonal flu. In doing so, it’s essentially acting as a vaccine against its far deadlier cousin. (The father of vaccinations, Edward Jenner, observed something similar: Cowpox protected dairy workers from the often-deadly and horribly disfiguring smallpox.)

Swine flu, therefore, prevents more flu deaths than it causes. Unfortunately, the U.S. “hysteria curve,” as indicated by emergency-room visits by people worried they have the flu (and worried enough to seek medical attention) is still at a higher level than for any other flu season in the 21st century. You can probably credit, in part, Obama’s October 23 “national emergency” declaration. Nothing like an official pronouncement to send people with slight fevers — real or imagined — into fever pitch. Perhaps the administration can argue that extra work hours put in by exhausted health-care personnel, and by a sensationalist media hyping the story, are stimulating the economy.

— Michael Fumento is director of the nonprofit Independent Journalism Project, where he specializes in science and health issues, and author of The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS: How a Tragedy Has Been Distorted by the Media and Partisan Politics.