According to this, 2009's H1N1 virus (aka swine flu) infected 1,632,258 people and killed 284,500, making for an eye-watering 17.4% fatality rate.
I've seen many people sharing this, and some are even using this to allege racism in the coverage of/reaction to the Wuhan coronavirus. Depressingly, even Donald Low has reposted this, which is one reason why I feel the need to formally document the problem with this statistic.
Of course, we know right off the bat that this is wrong. Most of us lived through 2009's officially WHO-certified H1N1 "pandemic", which an independent panel criticised as an overreaction. But even for those of us who didn't, it is trivial to find out that the death rate was 0.02%.
It is instructive looking at where Business Insider got their numbers from, as it's a useful exercise.
The figure of 1,632,258 H1N1 infections is the number of confirmed cases (the number seems to have come from Wikipedia - for the sake of this exercise we shall assume it's correct). However, the number of 284,500 deaths is not the commensurate figure of confirmed deaths (which according to the Wikipedia article was 19,633). Instead, it comes from the CDC's *estimate* of the total number of H1N1 deaths.
So Business Insider is comparing estimated deaths with confirmed H1N1 cases. No wonder the mortality rate is unexpectedly high!
This is like calculating Singapore's unemployment rate for citizens by dividing the number of unemployed citizens and permanent residents by the total number of citizens, resulting in an inaccurately high number. When calculating rates, the numerator and denominator need to be comparable, or one will get strange results.
Happily, Business Insider has since corrected this table, noting that "A previous version of the chart in this article incorrectly reported the case-fatality rate of H1N1. It is 0.02%."
Unfortunately, a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. The wrong table currently features on, among other places, r/indianews, Business Insider by Pulse (I guess they don't push updates down) and Donald Low's Facebook.
Doubtless it will continue to spread, perhaps because it plays to many people's prejudices about racism, the "biased" "Western" media and how China is being "defamed".
In the meantime, hysteria about the Wuhan Coronavirus will continue (to which I shall not devote a blog post, since other writers have adequately addressed the topic), proving that humans have short memories.
