It’s been a big week for pandemic flu news junkies. On Tuesday, President Bush gave a major speech at the National Institutes of Health, declaring he would ask Congress for $7.1 billion to prepare the country for a possible global outbreak. And yesterday, the Department of Health and Human Services finally released its own pandemic flu plan, which the government started drafting back in 1991.
At 396 pages, the plan is a whopper. (Hey, your tax dollars at work — 28 pages a year.) Despite the bulk of the document, coverage has been solid overall — with some notable exceptions involving, as usual, those things so many journalists dread — numbers.
Yesterday HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt discounted the possibility that the government was crying wolf, saying, “The reality is that if the H5N1 virus [bird flu] doesn’t trigger pandemic flu, there will be another virus that will.” In its report, his department outlined two possible pandemic influenza scenarios, one “moderate” (as in 1957 and 1968) and one “severe” (as in 1918), with various estimates laid out in an easy-to-compare table on page 18. Under the severe scenario, 9.9 million Americans would require hospitalization, and 1,903,000 would die. In both scenarios, HHS predicted that 90 million Americans (or a full 30 percent of the population) would become ill.
So how did Elizabeth Vargas lead off ABC’s evening news last night? By saying this: “On ‘World News Tonight,’ the government’s grim warning about bird flu. 100 million Americans could be infected.”
In short, in their seeming haste to get on the air, ABC merely created 10 million additional sick people out of whole cloth, as if the 90 million figure wasn’t dismaying enough already.
Meanwhile, we found a few other examples of the old “It’s 30 percent, let’s make it one-third!” trick. In a story posted on its site Wednesday, the New York Times led off, “An outbreak of the avian flu virus in the United States could infect one-third of the population and kill as many as 1.9 million people, according to an analysis by the federal government released today.” USA Today took a similar tack, reporting yesterday that the new plan “warns that a flu pandemic could sicken one-third of the population and kill up to 1.9 million Americans.”
Saying “one-third” is not accurate — it’s actually off by millions — but why get specific when there is a phrase that everyone understands?
That seemed to be what the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was thinking with its lede today, writing that “An influenza pandemic could kill up to 2 million Americans” — an addition of 97,000 to the HHS figure. (Inexplicably, a summary of HHS report factoids at the end of the story accurately quotes the 1.9 million number.)
Numbers matter — as the debate over the 2,000th American soldier killed in Iraq showed last week. Not to mention the heat that the press took not long ago for overestimating (courtesy of local officials) the number of hurricane deaths in New Orleans by a factor of 10-to-1.
If the pandemic press can’t get the numbers in a government report right — numbers staring them right in the face — how will they fare when the story stops being theoretical, and starts getting real?
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.