CDC downplays estimates on flu deaths, infections

ATLANTA — Up to 90,000 deaths from swine flu in the United States, mostly among children and young people?

Up to 1.8 million people hospitalized, with 50 percent to 100 percent of intensive-care beds in some cities filled with swine-flu patients?

Up to half the population infected by winter?

On Monday, a White House advisory panel issued a report with these estimates, calling them "a plausible scenario" for a second wave of infections by the new H1N1 flu. The grim numbers by the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology received considerable play in the news media, including front-page coverage in The Seattle Times.

On Tuesday, however, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the agency with the most expertise on influenza pandemics, suggested that the projections should be regarded with caution.

"We don't necessarily see this as a likely scenario," said Dr. Anne Schuchat, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

A CDC press officer, speaking carefully to avoid a feud with the White House press office, said, "Look, if the virus keeps behaving the way it is now, I don't think anyone here expects anything like 90,000 deaths."

Even one of the experts who helped prepare the White House report said Tuesday that the numbers probably were on the high side, given that some weeks had passed since the calculations were finished in early August.

"As more data has come out of the Southern Hemisphere, where it seems to be fading, it looks as if it's going to be somewhat milder," said the expert, Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health. "If we were betting on the most likely number, I'd say it's not 90,000 deaths; it's lower."

Dr. Harold Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York and one of the panel's chairmen, defended the report.

"A lot of people think the flu is over," Varmus said. "We think it's important that there be a dose of reality. It's certainly not an outlandish proposal. A lot of people are going to be infected."

Since the epidemic began, the CDC has been reluctant to issue projections about probable swine-flu cases, and the agency has even stopped estimating how many Americans have had the flu. The official estimate has been stuck at "more than 1 million" for months.

Lyn Finelli, head of surveillance for the influenza division, was asked when that would be updated. "Sometime in the next few weeks," Finelli said. "We're working on the model."