Remember my piece on the "Swine Flu" hysteria? I wrote it on November 12, that means week 46. The next day, the German Ministry of Health changed the notification rules for suspected and confirmed cases of "Swine Flu" infections

- both do not need to be reported to the authorities anymore, only confirmed deaths are to be registered. Of course, this had nothing to do with me writing about the "Swine Flu", but there is another interesting thing about this rule change:

It naturally means that a lot less testing has been taking place since then - and, as a result, less confirmed cases have been reported. I compiled the weekly numbers given by the German Robert Koch Institut:

Now, these are only the confirmed cases, and since testing and reporting isn't mandatory anymore, clearly a downward trend in these numbers does not mean that the real infection numbers in the wild are declining as well. The simple truth is that we do not have any reliable numbers for "Swine Flu" infections because of the change in notification rules. But of course, this neat little statistic, while being increasingly obsolete, what with few suspected infections being tested, much less reported to the Robert Koch Institut, combined with the natural tendency of the public and the media to jump onto new, more exciting topics, has resulted in a sharp down-tick in both interest and coverage of the epidemic:

Unfortunately, Google Trends, while excellent for quick-and-dirty graphs like the one above, does not give any absolute numbers. But suffice to say that the decline in both searches and news for the term "Schweinegrippe" ("German for "Swine Flu", region was confined to "Germany") started almost in sync with the change of notification rules during the first half of November - all the while the real infection numbers are likely still on the rise (or, at least, on no decline nearly as sharp as the interest in it).

The reality of this will hit you even harder if you take a look at confirmed "Swine Flu" deaths (I couldn't find a comprehensive week-by-week statistic for Germany, so I took the EU and EFTA numbers from here I figure this is justifiable in a more and more unified EU).

Whoa.

So, the first rush of media drowned us in hysteria, and now, with the number of confirmed deaths actually rising, the media frenzy died down. Hooray for the mainstream media! Hooray for the public's short attention span! Hooray for..hey, look over there! Christmas candy! Weeeee!

Addendum:
As of December 8, 2009, there have been 192,348 confirmed cases and 94 confirmed deaths in Germany alone. Sadly, I haven't found a week-by-week statistic for the deaths yet, so if anyone knows where to find it, please leave it in the comments.