2,000 students at Washington State University report flu symptoms

Re:2,000 students at Washington State University report flu ... by tokenadult on Sunday September 06, 2009 @07:20PM (#808289)

That doesn't say anything about a difference in the case fatality rate between the two strains of flu until you tell me how many cases there are of typical seasonal flu in Germany each year.

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Re:2,000 students at Washington State University report flu ... by onreact-com on Monday September 07, 2009 @03:44AM (#808770)

Did you read my comment actually? I just wrote:

"20k flu related deaths in Germany each year"

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Re:2,000 students at Washington State University report flu ... by gjm11 on Monday September 07, 2009 @05:26AM (#808862)

But you didn't say how many cases of (non-swine) flu there are each year, which makes it difficult to extract any information about the per-case fatality rate. On the other hand, if your figures are right then we can be pretty sure that swine flue is relatively mild, unless just about everyone in Germany gets flu every year. On the other other hand, (1) one thing that's unusual about the current swine flu epidemic is that it's happening out of the normal flu season, so some of the credit for the low death rate may be due to the fact that people aren't yet getting it in winter; and (2) no one is actually disputing that swine flu, as it is now, is pretty benign; the question is how likely it is that a slightly mutated version will turn up that starts killing a lot more people.

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Re:2,000 students at Washington State University report flu ... by onreact-com on Monday September 07, 2009 @05:31AM (#808871)

You still haven't read it: "not a single [swine flu] death". So the 20k deaths obviously refers to seasonal flu.

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Re:2,000 students at Washington State University report flu ... by gjm11 on Monday September 07, 2009 @03:21PM (#809606)

sigh

Yes, 20k deaths obviously refers to seasonal flu. 20k deaths OUT OF HOW MANY CASES? No information. So we don't know the death rate for ordinary seasonal flu. So we don't know just how the rates for swine flu and ordinary seasonal flu compare.

(Of course we know -- assuming your numbers are right -- that the observed death rate for swine flu is zero. But we don't know, e.g., whether the death rate for seasonal flu is so low that a figure of zero would be unsurprising even if swine flu were worse than typical seasonal flu.

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