I’m puzzling over the status of H1N1 here in Alberta. We’re clearly in the “second wave” here, with sharp rises in hospitalizations, ICU admissions and deaths in the past 2 weeks or so. The current lab-confirmed stats for Alberta say there have been 25 H1N1 deaths here (as of November 9):

http://www.health.alberta.ca/health-info/influenza-H1N1-cases.html

On the one hand, given the many media sources saying “Canada has 2000-4000 deaths from seasonal flu annually” (or 2000-8000, or 4000-8000, or….I’ve seen several different estimates, but all in this range), and given that Alberta has about 10% of Canada’s population, I’d expect 200-800 deaths from seasonal flu here on average.  So 25 seems low, even factoring in that we are early on in the flu season. On the other hand, in a report from Alberta Health Services themselves—click the blue “Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 Response Plan” button to open the report as a pdf file—at the end of the second paragraph on page 7 it states:

“Seasonal influenza usually results in about 17 deaths annually in Alberta…”

So could we either correct the typo (should 17 deaths be 170?), or change the story? I do not see how we can keep saying H1N1 is a “milder than usual flu” if this 17 number is correct. Yes, since more people are expected to catch H1N1 than seasonal flu, you could say it’s less virulent—it’ll kill a lower percentage of those it infects than seasonal flu does—but in assessing risk to yourself and your family, you need to consider BOTH how likely it is to develop serious complications, and how likely you are to catch the illness in the first place.

Really hoping for some clarification on this soon. My personal opinion is that the 17 number is a typo, but I’d love to know for sure. And you’d think Alberta Health Services folks would be a bit more careful in terms of double-checking their numbers before releasing documents to the public. But given the misguided way they handled the initial vaccine roll out here, perhaps not.