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Comment by emeidi | Hacker News Reader

How many people have died in the same timeframe in the Bay Area let's say in car accidents or in homicides?

While usually a good heuristic, such comparisons do not apply when dealing with self-replicating phenomena, like viruses and bacteria. It might be 17 now, but without proper care it could easily get to 7k or 7M.

Deaths from H1N1 tends to be treated as unique and scary, despite overall being much lower than deaths from plain old normal flu. It's hyped largely because it has higher mortality for people who are not normally in the death-from-flu demographic.

Back at my old job (doing special projects and data journalism for a small-town newspaper), I got to do week-by-week tracking of the flu season during the first year H1N1 was big in the media. Index of coverage is, surprisingly, still up and mostly works:

http://www2.ljworld.com/data/flu/

For the period we tracked (end September 2009 to end January 2010), deaths from "normal" flu outnumbered deaths from H1N1 by a factor of 33.

The demographic difference also comes through there: 14% of deaths from "normal" flu were under 65, while 80% of deaths from H1N1 were under 65.

Thank you for a very informative comment.

I didn't realize that the normal flu deaths, even when looking at the percentage of people under 65, outnumbered deaths from H1N1 by such a large factor.

Are they contagious?

I have read articles lately when modeling crime like spreading disease it predicts the real world with remarkable accuracy.

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