no alarms and no surprises, please

(the swine flu is coming to get you)
90,000 people could die from the Swine Flu this year! 2 million could be hospitalized!1!1!1 omg. run for the hills. take cover. this winter there's gonna be widespread panic (at the disco, perhaps, even.)
this is gonna be huge. massive chaos, i tell you. (or it could be "much milder" says CDC director.)

so H1N1 (a.k.a. Swine Flu - which, by the way, would be a sweet name for a hip hop star) could be the biggest pandemic since full blown AIDS hit the scene when Magic Johnson got it in '91 or it could be just another typical flu season (20,000-40,000 people typically die from the flu each year... 63,000 died from the influenza in '01) so basically, if Magic Johnson gets Swine Flu this year, they'll probably call a press conference to announce 'the end is near'.

it's good to panic, though. because it makes hindsight all the more zany, in the long run.
i suppose that in 9 or 10 months we'll all look at the Swine Flu outbreak and with whimsical opines we stand around the water cooler joking at how this 'pandemic' only killed 45,000 people instead of 90,000! ha. i can hear the waves of laughter carry through the halls now.

meanwhile, in the time it took you to read this, 20 people died of hunger. 15 million children will die of hunger this year. in the United States of America, one out of every six children is at risk of hunger. [stats]

but nobody 'panics' about that.