City Room™ - Science - Projected Swine Flu in Chicago

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Projected Swine Flu in Chicago
Produced by Gabriel Spitzer on Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Seven-month-old Alexa Zuniga wears a surgical mask in Tijuana (AP Photo/Guillermo Arias)

Researchers in Illinois and Indiana have come up with worst-case scenarios for the spread of swine flu.

The Chicago area could have about 90 cases of swine flu in the next three weeks. That’s the estimate of a computer model run by Indiana University’s Alessandro Vespignani – he works with statistics and complex systems. The number comes with caveats: it’s an early guess, and it assumes no major action is taken to fight the spread, so the real number could be lower.

Northwestern University Professor Dirk Brockmann runs his own models. He says he’s constantly incorporating new confirmed cases.

BROCKMANN: It’s a little bit like a weather forecast. You know, you can make a weather forecast of a wind or a storm, and it works for some time. And then it doesn’t work any more, and then you feed it with the new information that you have to make another forecast.

Nationwide, Brockmann’s work projects about 1,700 cases of swine flu within four weeks. That’s also a worst-case estimate. Brockmann and Vespignani say their models use very different methodologies, but generally agree on the numbers.

Map: Worst Case Scenario 14 Day Projection
Map: Worst Case Scenario 28 Day Projection
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Curtis, Lincoln Square // Friday, May 01, 2009 @ 11:16 AM

You folks at NPR and PR Chicago need to get the name right for this flu to keep your reputation for getting it right. Despite its name, there is no evidence at this time that this tragic outbreak of H1N1 (swine) flu came from pigs. It is spread person-to-person and not from eating pork. While there are precautions, you can take to keep yourself healthier, avoiding a tasty pork chop is not one of them and continuing to use the incorrect name for this flu hurts agricultural markets here and around the world and leads to misinformation. President Obama and the CDC have made the correction, please follow suit. Thank you, Curtis