Michael Fumento

At a glance, though, the estimates look okay; it's the spin and the lack of perspective that I have trouble with. And while the media have missed it, they also show an extremely low case-fatality ratio compared to seasonal flu.

According to the CDC, seasonal flu causes 15 to 60 million infections yearly with 36,000 resulting deaths, for a fatality rate ranging from 0.06% to 0.24%. It now estimates that since the swine flu outbreak began there have been 22 million cases causing 4000 deaths, for a fatality rate of 0.0182%. So the death rate from seasonal flu is about three to 12 times higher.

It estimates there have been 540 child deaths - those under age 18. But if just 3% of seasonal flu deaths were in children it would come out to 1,080 deaths.

Once again, it's much squealing about very little.