Quite a few people at work have had a nasty cold and a cough recently - it's probably the same where you work. Strap-hanging on the Tube this morning, I was struck by the number of people with the chesty cough that's typical of the latter stages of the infection. And, you know what? Nobody mentioned swine flu.
Yet, little more than a year ago, every sore throat and runny nose was a potential precursor to a mysterious and potentially lethal disease against which the United Kingdom was poorly prepared.
How quickly we forget.
"Swine Flu to Hit Millions," intoned the Daily Mail (July 3 2009), continuing:
"Tamiflu may be rationed says health minister as he issues warning of 100,000 fresh British cases a day.
Millions of Britons will contract swine flu in the coming months, the Health Secretary predicted yesterday. Putting Britain on epidemic alert, Andy Burnham warned that there could be 100,000 fresh cases every day by the end of August.
Under new rules announced yesterday, anyone with flu symptoms is advised not to go to their GP for fear of spreading the disease. Instead they should quarantine themselves in their home.
Sufferers will have to nominate a 'flu friend' to pick up antiviral medicine from special drug collection points, and then post them through the letterbox."
Remember all that?
The clamour was born out by the first H1N1-related deaths in the UK and, then, as the tabloids' predictions of devastation failed to materialise, interest began to wane. Before long questions started to be asked, among them, whether the Government had overreacted; whereas previously the tabloid hue and cry had been that the country was underprepared. It was all a bit rich.
There was no corner of the world and no aspect of human existence that, it seemed, was unaffected.
The Daily Mail reported on Wednesday 9 September 2009 that in France la bise, the practice of planting a kiss on each cheek to say hello or goodbye, could be outlawed because of swine flu.
In Naples, pall bearers at the funeral of Gaetano Doria, Italy's first swine flu victim, wore rubber gloves and masks.
"They refused to touch the coffin and it arrived in church on a trolley," reported the Mail, "despite health officials insisting there was no need for such precautions."
(Oddly, I thought at the time, there was no discussion in the Metro about the risk of infection from picking up a free newspaper on the Tube that had been previously handled by any number of possible carriers. Perhaps newsprint had special antiviral properties.)
So, apart from the fact that hindsight is a wonderful thing, what can journalists learn from the way the swine flu story was covered? In no particular order, I came up with:
- The enduring power of the popular press to influence decision-making at the highest level
- The propensity for certain news organisations to be pessimistic because they think bad news sells
- The pressure for other news organisations to jump on the bandwagon
- The danger that this becomes received wisdom
- The judgmental, simplistic assumption that somebody is to blame or someone is incompetent
- That it takes courage for any journalist to stand in the way of this avalanche and say 'hang on a minute'
- The fact that the media has a short memory.
And I've found it's not just news organisations that are quick to forget. For example, the word 'pandemic' momentarily slipped the mind of a helpful civil servant I spoke to recently.
"It's such a long time ago, I can't remember the terminology," they said.
"Did it reach pandemic status?" another asked me when I rang for guidance about statistics.
Then there are the people whose lives were touched forever by the disease but who returned to obscurity once the media spotlight had passed over them.
What became of the family of Jacqui Fleming, for instance - the mother from Glasgow who was the first person outside the Americas to die as a consequence of contracting swine flu?
Perhaps they declined further publicity; perhaps nobody has approached them for a follow-up. Either way, there are a lot of unanswered questions about the ordinary people whose encounter with swine flu constituted a quick flash in the media's pan, when attention hovered longest over celebrities and the most tragic.
The statistics are problematic, too. For instance, finding a definitive number of swine flu deaths is difficult, because in many cases those who died had other underlying conditions. H1N1 hastened their deaths but was not the primary cause, so the Office for National Statistics (ONS) had trouble giving me a figure. The latest UK total I could find was 29, as reported by the BBC on 17 July 2009.
So, as far as the media's concerned, swine flu has slipped into obscurity. But that doesn't mean there aren't stories out there associated with the pandemic. Maybe one of them is about a triumph of public health education; that the outbreak would have been worse if people hadn't followed the advice to: "Catch it, bin it, kill it".
Who knows?
Judging by the number of people coughing and sneezing on public transport, that's something else from the swine flu pandemic that's been quickly forgotten.
