Thursday, May 21, 2009

Swine flu update - 5/21/09

The CDC has made some background change in its daily reporting of confirmed and probable cases of swine flu, and this change eliminated the easy way of spotting the largest increases in cases. When the daily data are copied from the CDC site into a spreadsheet, now the words "cases" and "deaths" show up in each cell, rendering unusable formulas that could be used to calculate percentage changes.

OK; for yesterday?

The number of new reported cases in Illinois (these are the only ones in which we are interested; right?) rose from 707 to 794 (Tuesday-to-Wednesday), an increase of 87.

But in the whole U.S. there were only 241 new cases. Illinois had 1/3 of them! But still a total of only 794 cases in Illinois.

Let's hope this is not a "sleeper" virus and that we don't wake up some morning to hear of millions of new cases and deaths!

2 comments:

Zane said...

Maybe when he's fired he can work for the sheriff's office. I hear they already have one deouty working for them that Algonquin fired.

Gus said...

Ole Blinky, is this the article you meant for your posting?