Swine Flu: Guidance for planners

The UK Department of Health has updated its pandemic flu outlook in a new document ‘Swine Flu: Guidance for planners’. This makes the following key points:

* The first wave of the swine flu pandemic saw a peak in mid to late July with estimates of over 100,000 new cases a week in England by the end of July. Numbers then declined rapidly and continued at a fairly low level until early September. Since mid-September the numbers have started to increase again, though less quickly than in the first wave of the pandemic. This recent upward trend suggests that the UK may now be experiencing the predicted second wave of swine flu.

* New evidence suggests that although the number of cases continues to grow, the pandemic is evolving steadily in the UK and the second peak may be lower than originally thought. The worst-case planning assumptions can therefore be revised downwards.

* The worst-case clinical attack rate across the population as a whole has now been reduced from 30 percent to 12 percent between now and the end of the normal flu season. This means that in the peak week of the pandemic up to 1.5 million people may become ill and 5 percent of people could be absent from work, compared to the 12 percent previously thought possible. It should be noted that this is in addition to normal winter absence rates.

* There is no change to the advice about the duration of illness: around 75 percent of people who become ill will recover within ten days, and those with complications normally between ten and fourteen days.

* Although the new information from experience of the virus to date suggests that we may not see a concentrated second peak, it is vital to remain prepared for the full range of possibilities. Modellers anticipate that swine flu may peak again between the end of October and mid November.

* Although the virus currently remains stable, there is also the possibility that it might mutate in due course into a more aggressive strain, in which case a further wave might be more significant.

Read the complete guidance document.

•Date: 27th Oct 2009• Region: UK •Type: Article •Topic: Pandemic planning
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