They're still not doing a great job explaining why this one, in particular, matters, since most people are only having typical flu symptoms:
The virus could cause nothing more than a typical flu season for the Northern Hemisphere this winter. But many experts suspect the second wave could be more severe than an average flu season, which hospitalizes an estimated 200,000 Americans and contributes to 36,000 deaths. Because the virus is new, most people are not immune to it.
"This epidemic will transmit faster than usual, because the population is more susceptible," said Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health who has been helping the CDC project the severity of the upcoming wave. "It's fair to say there will be tens of millions of illnesses and hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations, and tens of thousands of deaths. That's not atypical. It just depends on how many tens of thousands."
Perhaps more important, in every country where the virus has spread, it has continued to affect children and young adults much more commonly than typical flu viruses.
