David,
Certainly some of this is overblown. But you don't need to go back many years when H1N1 virus killed 50 to 100 million people during the 1917 - 1919 influenza pandemic - many brought it back from the war to the US. The first case in the US was in Kansas of all places. In some cases entire communities were killed. Measles and other diseases killed incredible numbers of people. The plague killed millions on multiple occasions.
Public health depends upon two avenues to mitigate this - vaccination and isolation. As there is no vaccine, isolating the sick from the healthy is really the only course of action. Unfortunately, to isolate people it needs to be broadly communicated. Hence the over hype.
However, if you were in Hong Kong when the avian flu was running around, you wouldn't consider it over hyped there. If a highly communicable disease were to start in the US, the first level of containment is via isolation. This is what worked during the plague. We have been lucky so far. The yellow fever epidemics of the nineteenth century in the US are a main reason we developed such a strong public health system. An abundance of precaution is necessary to see it doesn't happen again. Sometime we see this as hype.
Shawn
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