The first week of August is traditionally Provincetown’s family week, and so a lot of families have passed through in the past couple of days. What surprised me was the level of panic amongst parents in relation to the novel Swine Flu pandemic (H1N1). Don’t get me wrong, you can’t see a whole bunch of kids wearing masks on the streets, but sit in a store for a few hours and you’re bound to meet some. Indeed, the U.S. government’s Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention (CDC) did publish a rather scary special bulletin about the outbreak which reads:

On June 11, 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) raised the worldwide pandemic alert level to Phase 6 in response to the ongoing global spread of the novel influenza A (H1N1) virus. A Phase 6 designation indicates that a global pandemic is underway.

Yes, we should do our best to protect our children, but is it really time to break out the masks and enter full panic mode?

This blogger certainly thinks so. “Holy crap! 141 H1N1 deaths worldwide! Good grief people,” he wrote on June 11. Even though that number tripled since then, and even though some 400 families lost a loved one we still shouldn’t panic as, according to the CDC, on average 36,000 people die from flu every year in the United States alone.

A total of 436 people have died in the United States from H1N1 as of this Friday (CDC). As a matter of fact, since the WHO declared the pandemic on June 11, the trend of new U.S. H1N1 deaths has been nearly linear, with on average 45 new deaths each week. Even if that trend tripled next week and stayed the same until the end of the year, the number of deaths would still be incomparable to the average number of flu deaths. And even if it were comparable, how many people you know died of flu?

Photo courtesy of thegtworld.com.

Categorized as Opinions