Swine flu: are we there, yet?

Listening to yesterday’s press briefing with WHO’s Dr. Keiji Fukuda (audio file here), several things seemed clear to me. The first is that everyone, WHO included, thinks a pandemic is well underway. Second, WHO’s efforts to explain why they are not making it “official” by going to phase 6 are becoming increasingly awkward and the explanations manifestly tortured. Essentially what Fukuda said was that WHO was waiting for its member nations to signal they knew it was a pandemic and then WHO would say it was a pandemic. It was reminiscent of the cries of one of the principals of the revolution of 1848 as he chased the mob into Paris’s Jardin du Luxembourg: “I’m their leader! I must follow them!” Third, despite Fukuda’s calm and measured tone, there was an undercurrent of worry. The severity of the not-yet-called-a-pandemic pandemic is now being termed “moderate” (which seems accurate to me). Fukuda explicitly declined to characterize it as “mild.” He also called attention to reports of “disproportionate numbers of serious cases occurring” in Canada’s First Nation (indigenous) community. From the Winnipeg Free Press:

There has been a “surge” in the number of people requiring intensive care in Manitoba hospitals with flu-like illnesses, the province said Monday.

As of Sunday night, there were 26 such people in hospital — more than half of them aboriginal. All were or had been on ventilators due to influenza or of an influenza-like illness. Eight persons with severe cases required hospitalization in the past week alone.
Joel Kettner, chief provincial public health officer, said Monday “most if not all” of the cases are expected to be confirmed as the new H1N1 influenza.

[snip]

Kettner said the 26 people on ventilators in hospital are “very ill.”

“Some of them have been on ventilators for several weeks… The pattern has been so far that many of these patients have required several weeks of intensive care before they have recovered.”

He said that in the first week of June, the rate at which people became severely ill with what is suspected as H1N1 was far higher than it was in April or May.

More than half of those in intensive care are First Nations people — status or non-status as well as Inuit.

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