JoeTheJuggler
Penultimate Amazing
- Joined
- Jun 7, 2006
- Messages
- 27,766
So you give the benefit of the doubt, err on the side of caution, and a bunch of people who had some variety of creeping crud other than influenza also don't come in and spread that around. Is the price of that policy really so grevious?
Also, the exact number of cases isn't so important anymore.
Again, according to the CDC (my bolding):
Why did CDC discontinue reporting of individual cases?
Individual case counts were used in the early stages of the outbreak to track the spread of disease. As novel H1N1 flu became more widespread, individual case counts became an increasingly inaccurate representation of the true burden of disease. This is because many people likely became mildly ill with novel H1N1 flu and never sought treatment; many people may have sought and received treatment but were never officially tested or diagnosed; and as the outbreak intensified, in some cases, testing was limited to only hospitalized patients. That means that the official case count represented only a fraction of the true burden of novel H1N1 flu illness in the United States. CDC recognized early in the outbreak that once disease was widespread, it would be more valuable to transition to standard surveillance systems to monitor illness, hospitalizations and deaths. CDC discontinued official reporting of individual cases on July 24, 2009. For more information about how CDC is monitoring novel H1N1 flu, visit “H1N1 Monitoring Q &A” at http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/reportingqa.htm.