The sum of the national figures counting the laboratory-confirmed swine flu deaths has surpassed 1,000. It means that the "consensus" of our poll from April 2009 has already been proved wrong.
As of today, 59% (454) people thought that the toll before the end of 2009 would be below 1,000. Additional 22% (167) thought it would be below 10,000, additional 4% (34) thought it would be below 100,000, additional 3% (23) thought it wold be below 1,000,000, extra 2% (17) thought it would be below 10,000,000, while a whopping 10% (81) thought that the toll would exceed 10 million.
Please feel free to vote again and/or edit your vote. My vote in April was 1,000-9,999 so it's "alive".
Michal Tučný's classic country-music song, "Everyone is already in Mexico", was recently modified to explain that swine flu is in Mexico, and one shouldn't be drunk all the time, which reduces his immunity. :-) The music above is the original song.
I think that the disease has already gone mainstream. Britain has 100,000 cases so all ideas about quarantines and demonization of all hypothetically infected must be forgotten. ;-) But I also think that it has been showed that this virus doesn't differ "profoundly" from other "seasonal" types of flu that (so far) kill many more people per year (36,000 just in the U.S.) and that the special care given to swine flu may be called a hype.
