Everyone seems to be rather fearful of this new H1N1 virus. Some of those fears are well founded, but a lot of them are just uneducated panic.

So far there have been a few hundred deaths in Mexico, and several more cases are showing up in countires all over the world. However, the death rates outside the original infection area have been very low. To date, approximately two weeks after this whole thing began, less than 1000 people have died from the H1N1 flu.

To give you some context, almost 500,000 people die from heart disease in the US annually. You can verify this on the CDC website. The actual number is around 430,000. That's approximately 1730 people per day, just in the US. I like to use this as my benchmark for panic from massive deaths, as it is the leading cause of death in the United States. So until we start loosing more than 1700 people a day from H1N1, I'm not going to start worrying too much.

Oh, and about 36,000 people a year (~100 per day) die from plain old non media hyped flu, just in the US. CDC Flu Fact Sheet

All of that being said, the scary part of a very virulant flu is its ability to pass from human to human and its lethality. Viruses can spread at a geometric rate and quickly pass our magic 1700/day rate if the infection doubles every day and kills more than 10% of its victims. However, we are not seeing anything near that with the H1N1 virus. So wash your hands, and don't live in fear.