At least 1 million people in the United States have had swine flu, or around 50 times more than the number of cases reported to health authorities, a top official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Friday. “We're saying that there have been at least a million cases of the new H1N1 virus so far this year in the United States,” Anne Schuchat, the director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told a Washington news conference. “Reported cases are really just the tip of the iceberg,” Schuchat said of the 287,000 confirmed cases of (A)H1N1 influenza in the United States. The CDC determined its figure of 1 million based on computer models and surveys of communities known to have had several cases of the new strain of flu. About 3,000 people infected with swine flu in the United States have had to be hospitalized, and 127 people are reported to have died.
