NP: Chelsea vs. Fulham

Nate Silver parses a recent survey on swine flu. I think he's leaving out mass delusion brought on by non-stop media coverage, although that's inherent in his possible explanations, particularly this one.

3. People are mistaking all sorts of things which aren't swine flu -- fevers, food poisoning, hangovers, etc. -- for swine flu, and reporting results accordingly.

The reason this jumps out at me goes back to the wall-to-wall coverage of the "Beltway sniper" back in 2002, when I saw some national survey results where some astounding percentage of people thought there was a chance they were in danger of sniper attacks. And the percentage of the overall population who might be affected by two people was even smaller than the infinitesimal percentage who might be infected by 500 or so confirmed cases.

For the record, I do not know a single person with swine flu. I probably know at least one person who thinks they might have it, but they're wrong.