This contrasts with 17% of deaths and 32% of cases of severe pneumonia in that age group during the peak of seasonal influenza periods from 2005 to 2008.
Morbidity and mortality among patients aged 60 years and older during the current pandemic has been significantly lower than among younger individuals. The investigators suggested that older individuals were more likely to have acquired some immunity by being exposed to H1N1 strains before those strains disappeared from the human population in 1957.
“If there is good news,” wrote Dr. Morens, Dr. Taubenberger, and Dr. Fauci, “it is that successive pandemics and pandemiclike events generally appear to be decreasing in severity over time. This diminution is surely due in part to advances in medicine and public health, but it may also reflect viral evolutionary 'choices' that favor optimal transmissibility with minimal pathogenicity—a virus that kills its hosts or sends them to bed is not optimally transmissible.”
One of the authors of the report on rapid influenza tests said he had received grant support from Sanofi Pasteur. All the other authors of that article and all the authors of the other articles stated that they had no relevant conflicts of interest.