12 Flu Victims Have Died, and Ill May Total 550,000
· By ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS Published: June 10, 2009
New York City officials on Wednesday reported the deaths of three more people with swine flu, and estimated that more than half a million New Yorkers may have become sick from the virus.
The city also announced 102 new hospitalizations since its last report on Monday, bringing the total hospitalizations to 530.
Dr. Don Weiss, director of surveillance for the Bureau of Communicable Disease, said that what looked like a spike in hospitalizations actually represented catching up from a lag in reporting over the weekend. He said that hospitalizations were running at the rate of 35 to 40 a day, and "don’t appear to be going up or down appreciably." Health officials said that in a telephone poll of New Yorkers, 6.9 percent of those surveyed reported having flulike illness, like fever and cough or a sore throat, between May 1 and May 20.
Extrapolated to the general population, that would mean that about 550,000 people could have become sick with the virus.
The 500 who have been hospitalized make up a tiny proportion — about one-tenth of 1 percent — of those who became ill, an indication of how mild the virus generally has been, officials said.
