Today the California Watch team brings you an updated, interactive graphic showing how many residents of each California county have died or been hospitalized due to the swine flu. To complement their work, I rounded up some of the most interesting and enterprising reporting that I've seen on the flu.
Check out the graphic here.
As you will see, the numbers seem to be snowballing a bit in the south end of the state and holding steady in the north. Since the strain began infecting California residents, more than 8,300 perople have been hospitalized and 470 have died, according to the Department of Public Health.
The number of hospitalizations and deaths peaked in November, according to DPH graphics that show the peaks and valleys of serious case counts.
Last week, the Los Angeles Times reported that the state’s public health director predicted that we could see a “third wave” of infections.
While that’s possible, the Washington Post reported in December that swine flu was even milder than past pandemics. And based on research looking at Milwaukee and New York City, the swine flu seemed to be on track to mirror or exceed the death toll of the seasonal flu. The key difference, though, is that H1N1 seems to be disproportionately hard on children and young adults.
Reporting by USA Today and the Sacramento Bee zoned in on the questions of privilege – or lack thereof – in examining the flu.
USA Today reported in December that distribution of the flu vaccine had favored some big corporations that were not bound to the same rules as others giving the vaccine to the very young and old first.
When the swine flu vaccine was most scarce, health officials gave thousands of doses to corporate clinics at Walt Disney World, Toyota, defense contractors, oil companies and cruise lines, according to a USA TODAY review of vaccine distribution data from three states.
At that time, USA Today reported that they’d requested the data on vaccine distribution from California officials but had not received it. The question about the data surfaced again in the Los Angeles Times' report about a conference call with public health director Mark Horton.
Horton was asked why the state had not released the names of companies and healthcare providers who received vaccine from the state. He said that because state officials did not notify the providers that their names could be released to the public if they received the vaccine, and that since there were other ways the public could find vaccine supply, his judgment was there was no need to release that information.
That is one explanation, but it's not clear if it will hold up if challenged under the state's Public Records Act.
Finally, the Sacramento Bee conducted an interesting analysis of the relationship between where one lives and how likely they are to be seriously sickened by H1N1:
Residents living in Oak Park, North Sacramento and other predominantly low-income neighborhoods are up to eight times as likely to be hospitalized – and are dying more often – from the H1N1 flu virus compared with those living in communities like Folsom, east Sacramento and the Pocket, according to a Bee analysis of Sacramento County health data. Being poor is clearly an influencing factor in the severity of how the novel strain of flu is disproportionately affecting certain communities, according to Dr. Glennah Trochet, Sacramento County's chief public health officer. "When you live in poverty, you don't have access to things that lead you to healthy living. Maybe it's because they don't have access to health insurance and medical care," Trochet said.
Leave a comment if there’s an interesting take on the flu that we left out.
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