After months of covering swine flu from multiple countries and angles, Bloomberg News reporter Jason Gale was struggling to reconcile a pandemic that caused a lot of sickness yet was resulting in comparatively few deaths. It was only when Gale interviewed intensive-care doctors in New Zealand, where winter was spurring a surge in cases, that he understood that they represented a “pandemic paradox.” While perhaps only 1 person in 200 who gets the virus requires hospitalization, those who do often require heroic measures to keep them alive. Gale showed how the new strain’s predilection for striking down pregnant women and other young adults set the virus apart from the strains that cause seasonal epidemics, and helped shift attention onto the vulnerable groups and the sophisticated equipment needed to save them.
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