H1N1 Swine Flu Officially a Pandemic, Updated Charts

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The World Health Organization has officially declared the swine flu a pandemic. Here are some interesting quotes from the WHO press release:

This particular H1N1 strain has not circulated previously in humans. The virus is entirely new.The virus is contagious, spreading easily from one person to another, and from one country to another. As of today, nearly 30,000 confirmed cases have been reported in 74 countries. On the basis of available evidence, and these expert assessments of the evidence, the scientific criteria for an influenza pandemic have been met.

No previous pandemic has been detected so early or watched so closely, in real-time, right at the very beginning. The world can now reap the benefits of investments, over the last five years, in pandemic preparedness.

We know, too, that this early, patchy picture can change very quickly. The virus writes the rules and this one, like all influenza viruses, can change the rules, without rhyme or reason, at any time. Globally, we have good reason to believe that this pandemic, at least in its early days, will be of moderate severity.

Countries should prepare to see cases, or the further spread of cases, in the near future. Countries where outbreaks appear to have peaked should prepare for a second wave of infection.

Influenza pandemics, whether moderate or severe, are remarkable events because of the almost universal susceptibility of the world’s population to infection.

One key point that I have learned through all of this is that what makes a pandemic is not about the severity of the disease but its ability to spread readily through the population most importantly because of the fact that the global population has virtually no base immunity to the new virus. The impact of a pandemic is all about the impact to the macro scale - if too many people get even a mild virus too quickly then the public health system will not be able to keep up and that is where excess illnesses and deaths can come.

Updated Swine Flu Tracking Chart

Sorry to those who were looking for an updated tracking chart, I got behind in updated the charts. Here is an updated chart with an addition of Australia plotted specifically because it has shown a recent spike in cases although it looks like it may have already reached its slow phase.


One big benefit of plotting in a log scale is you can infer growth rate visually from the chart. So it looks like Australia's rate of growth was similar to the US rate of growth in the early fast phase. And now it looks like it is slowing down or plateauing. I would note for all of these which looked like they are plateauing, it is entirely possible that the cases could pick back up, this does not necessarily mean it is over. If they are still tracking the numbers I think this will be especially interesting as the Northern Hemisphere enters the flu season later this year.

The WHO has a nice interactive global graphic showing the number of cases by country and by time here.

Google Search Volume

Here is a chart grabbed from Google Insights showing the search volume for Canada, the U.S., and Australia:


You can see the more recent spike from Australia which corresponds to the spread of the swine flu in Australia as seen in the chart above.

Here is another interesting chart from Google Insights. This shows the search volume from the last 7 days to see what areas of the globe are showing the most search interest recently:

You can see that Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines have the highest swine flu search volume lately. (note that Google adjusts its search volume by population so think of this as search per capita)
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