Just to be clear: this graph is the 7 day moving average of new daily admissions to Australian hospitals of people who have tested positive to Swine Flu.

The graph is basically still flat – with no decline to speak of, that I can see. Over the last two months it’s varied between 90 and 50 admissions per day, and right now is basically back at its average of 74 admissions per day. We’re plateauing – but we’re not declining.

As I said yesterday: Are we at the peak? I don’t know. Let’s see what the next week brings.

(As always you can click on this graph to blow it up for a closer look. Then click the back button on your browser to get back to this post).

Here is the 7 day moving average of new cases being reported each day. We are now at a level (of about 300 new cases being reported per day) that we haven’t seen since early July:

As with all the graphs – you can click on this graph and blow it up to full screen for a better look.

Now have a look at the second graph. This is the 7 day moving average of deaths reported each day of people with swine flu. Again, the trend has been down, and we seem to have formed a clear peak in the last week.

The only graph that’s not shifting yet – that’s still just “plateaued” is the number of people currently in hospital with Swine Flu:

We have had one of the mildest Augusts ever all along the east coast of Australia this year – and that may have brought this peak forward earlier than many expected. Let’s see what the next week brings…

So, the risk with these figures is that we may get a fall off in daily new cases and therefore think we have hit the peak of the pandemic, when in fact all that has happened is that testing protocols have been changed.

In other words, we need measures that are not so affected by human decisions. One of those measures, I think, is the number of people dying with Swine Flu each day in Australia. That’s a number that is not going to be affected by decisions on testing, I assume. (If you’re that sick, they’ll test you. The only issue here is that in a normal flu season they might not test you, and simply put down your cause of death as pneumonia, but in a pandemic, my guess is that they will test). So, if we see this measure peak and start to fall sustainably, we can be pretty sure we’re over the hump of the pandemic and coming down the other side.

So, I’ve graphed the seven day moving average of daily deaths of people with Swine Flu in Australia. Note, I’ve said deaths of people with Swine Flu, not because of Swine Flu. These people have died and they had Swine Flu at the time – but that doesn’t tell us that it was Swine Flu that was responsible.

Anyway – here’s the graph. And as you can see, at the moment, on average, 3.7 people are dying each day in Australia with Swine Flu. That’s the highest it’s been since the start of the pandemic here, and it is showing no sign that we have reached the peak yet. Remember that you can click on this graph to blow it up.

I’ve also updated my usual two graphs with the latest figures from the Department of Health and Ageing. Here they are (clicking on these graphs will blow them up):

The feeling of flattening out is confirmed by the lack of movement in the current figures for people who are currently in hospital with Swine Flu. No let up there. We seem to get as many new admissions as there are discharges every day. (I hope to get the new admission figures worked out over the next few days).

Anyway, here’s the latest graph on people currently in hospital. For a full explanation of these graphs, have a look at the Australian Graphs page at the top of this blog. If you want to have a closer look at the graphs, just double-click on them.

As I’ve discussed before, the Department of Health and Ageing have a “notifiable diseases report generator” that will give you a table of disease notifications, which is then easy to graph. So, I’ve run this generator for influenza notifications and got some interesting stats.

The first graph (below) shows the number of influenza notifications in Australia for the years 2001 to 2008 (8 years all up), by month. At each month in this graph I show three points:

• The bottom point is the minimum value for this month over the 8 years. In other words, I look for the year that had the lowest number of flu notifications for that month, and that’s the figure I plot. For example, if I choose the month of July, the year with the fewest notifications for flu was 2004, with only 96 notifications being made in the July of that year. So, I plot 96 as the minimum point for July.
• The top point is the maximum value for the month. For example, for the month of July, the year with the most notifications was 2007 (of all the July’s from 2001 to 2008). In that year, July clocked up 2,470 notifications. So that’s the number I plot for maximum.
• The middle point for each month is the average number of notifications for that month over all the years 2001 to 2008. So, for July we got an average of 770 notifications in that month for the years (2001 to 2008). So I plot 770 as my average.

Note that these are notifications for all types of flu (not just swine flu, which wasn’t around in its present form anyway):

You can double click on this graph to expand it.

The graph tells an interesting story (as I’ve remarked before). Flu notifications tend to peak in August. And there’s still a lot of flu notifications in Australia in September (on average, more than in July). In other words – we are not through the worst of our normal flu season yet.

The next graph then becomes very interesting. All I’ve done is included 2009 monthly notifications in the above graph, as a fourth (purple) line. I’ve changed the scale to fit 2009 in. Here it is (again, you can double click on it to expand it):

I think this graph tells the story well enough as to just how bad this season is compared to a normal season. The only caveat I would add to this is that we have clearly undertaken a lot more testing for flu in Australia this season than in a normal season. So some of the marked increase in notifications has to be due to an increased testing effect. Just how much – I don’t know.

Does last week mark the peak of Swine Flu over here – the crest of the “pandemic wave”?

I doubt it. I’m sure we’re just testing fewer people.

Why am I sounding so certain? Well, apart from being an innate pessimist (what other personality type is going to start a blog about swine flu?), flu seasons just don’t seem to peak at this time of year – it seems a few weeks too early. In addition, the number of hospitalisations hasn’t declined. Here’s the graph:

So, let’s wait and see. While I think about other measures besides the confirmed new cases from the Department of Health and Ageing that might give us some indication of when the peak does actually arrive.

I’ve updated these two graphs on the Australian Graphs page. As always, you can double click on these graphs to blow them up and take a close look.

And it’s good to be back blogging. No excuses for not updating, apart from a very busy week: lots of travel for work and almost every night something on. Thanks for all the comments – it was really nice to be missed!