Me too. The situation doesn't seem to be getting any better. When it first appeared in 1997 in Hong Kong, they thought they wiped it out. They were wrong, unfortunately.
How long before we can safely say it was much ado about nothing?
That's a good question. The answer might be, "when we develop a decent vaccine and a way to manufacture it quickly and distribute it widely" - much as we have for other pandemic diseases.
The problem with this disease is, like all influenza viruses, it mutates rapidly so there is no "one size fits all" vaccine we can develop and then forget about like for polio, smallpox or diphtheria. Each new variant must be addressed.
The key, I think, is the development of new 21st century vaccine technologies and their infrastructures. Currently, we are still using early 20th century ones using chicken eggs. Unfortunately, we nearly destroyed the vaccine industry in this country during the Clinton years, so we are starting almost from scratch. Other countries are way ahead of us.
Well..for the birds I guess. How many humans have died? And wasn't the medical community equally certain that the aids virus was going to move into the heterosexual community and kill millions. And wasn't there another certainty that the swine flue was another great pandemic?