# 3603
I haven’t made it a practice to try to report on every pandemic death, simply because there are too many of them. But today I’m going to make an exception.
Not because this death is more tragic than many of the others, but because there are three important points to note about this story.
First the report.
Suffolk County man, an NYPD cop, dies after contracting swine flu
August 7, 2009 By BILL MASON AND RIDGELY OCHS. bill.mason@newsday.com,, ridgely.ochs@newsday.com
A young New York City police officer who lived in Blue Point died Friday after contracting swine flu, officials said.
Ryan Johnson, 27, of the 83rd Precinct in Brooklyn, is the eighth person in Suffolk whose death is linked to swine flu, the Suffolk County Health Department said.
"He fought valiantly over many weeks, often expressing his desire to return to the job," New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said in a statement Friday. "He was an impressive young man who will be missed by all who knew him."
<SNIP>
With Johnson's death, 10 deaths on Long Island have been linked to swine flu, including two in Nassau County.
New York City had 47 deaths as of July 7, when it stopped counting deaths attributed to the outbreak.
First, Ryan Johnson was 27 years of age, and in good enough physical condition to be a NYC cop for 5 years. His underlying medical condition was supposedly asthma, but according to other reports, his mother denies that.
Second, he was in ICU and in a coma for 7 weeks. The hospital threw everything they could at him, and still could not save him.
While most victims of this virus do recover without incident, hundreds have been hospitalized (and many have required time on a ventilator) in New York City alone.
This is a level of care that would not be available to 90% of the rest of the world, which should give us some indication of the level of underreporting of deaths we are seeing from the 168 countries now reportedly seeing novel influenza cases.
And third, New York City quit officially reporting deaths back in early July. The last update provided by the City’s health department was on July 9th. At that time there were 47 deaths.
Counting individual deaths from this virus is rapidly becoming less of a priority for a number of localities, with a greater reliance on surveillance systems like the 122 MRS.
Undoubtedly, the counts we’ve been getting have been of dubious value since the beginning, since few of the thousands of deaths that occur each day in this country are checked for the virus.
Hopefully we’ll start seeing better estimates of the impact of this pandemic as the fall and winter progress.
While it is important to keep things in perspective (seasonal flu kills tens of thousands each year), if people are to be motivated to get the H1N1 vaccine this fall, they have to believe the threat is real.
When they see only a few hundred `officially counted’ deaths nationwide over a three month time-span, it is hard to convince people of the need to take this virus seriously.
Getting a more realistic accounting of the true impact across the country would go a long ways towards motivating the public.
