On Swine flu in India - 3

What is the estimated number of cases in India till date? Is it 2909 as reported by media? The answer ofcourse is NO as I had suggested in my last blog looking at the apparent mortality rate data. On 9th August 2009 the apparent mortality rate was about 0.5% which is the rate that is widely held to be the correct number. The present apparent mortality rate is about 2.2%. This indicates that a large number are cases are not laboratory confirmed. A simple calculation indicates that there has been around 12600 cases of swine flu in India of which more than 9000 are not laboratory confirmed cases? The fundamental questions that arises are:

Q1: Did these people infect others? This is quite likely given the contagious nature of the infection

Q2: Did these people receive any treatment? Surely not all.

In the last week I estimate that around 7600 new cases of swine flu has occurred of which only 982 has been laboratory confirmed while in the previous week only around 3800 new cases occurred of which 968 were laboratory confirmed cases. This gives an indication that the number of new swine flu cases is possibly doubling every week. The next week is likely to have more than 15000 cases and around 75 deaths.

The government should reconsider its strategy of dealing with this problem. It may be prudent to make the drug Oseltamivir available through retail pharmacies so that the patients who need it can quickly access the drug. Also, the government may more actively train some of the good private laboratories to do this test so that doctors can access these laboratories when needed and unnecessary deaths due to delay in treatment can be avoided.