The number of swine flu patients being treated on intensive care wards rose by more than 50% in the past week, according to the Department of Health.
More than 750 people – 102 of them children – are currently in hospital in England owing to illnesses associated with the H1N1 virus. There are 157 patients in critical care.
The total number of deaths across the UK rose this week to 137, up from 128 at the end of the previous week. The estimated infection rate rose from 53,000 new cases last week to 78,000 this week – still well below the peak infection rate recorded in July.
The government's chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, warned that there has been a "very substantial increase in the numbers in intensive care" despite the lower prevalence.
"We are seeing a level of activity in the community which has not yet reached anywhere near the levels we were seeing in July," Sir Liam said.
"But we are seeing a level of ... serious illness in hospitals which has easily surpassed the level we saw in July."Every morning, around 5:30 or 6:00, I turn on my laptop and start going through some 50 or 60 emails about H1N1 that have arrived since 10:00 the night before. I know I'll get a couple of hundred more before the day is through.
A discouraging number of them try to tell me that this is a bogus pandemic; seasonal flu, they remind me again and again, kills 36,000 Americans every year. (Deaths outside America seem not to matter to these people.)
So why should we care about the illness and death that this "mild" influenza has inflicted on the world since last March?
My answer: Why don't we care about those 36,000? Or the 30,000 Americans killed by gunshots every single year since at least the 1960s? Or the people killed in auto accidents, or from tobacco, or any number of other preventable causes? And shall we get into HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and that smelly killer of millions of children, diarrhea?
La Rochefoucauld, that wise old cynic, long ago observed that we always find the strength to bear the misfortunes of other people.
To bear the misfortunes of seasonal-flu deaths, gunshot deaths, auto accidents, and so on, is not really a sign of strength, but of what Samuel Johnson called "stark insensibility." We are too stupid to care about the avoidable misery around us.
But when a new disease comes along, some of us rouse ourselves from our stupor and make some effort to contain the threat. Meanwhile, others only a little more stupid are asking us why we bother: "Hey, H1N1 isn't killing as many people as seasonal flu does. What's your problem?"
Well, one lesson we might take away from this pandemic is that every preventable death, whatever its cause, is a death we could and should prevent. If we all go back to business as usual when H1N1 fades away, we will deserve the wretched consequences.
