President Barack Obama declares a swine flu emergency. The declaration was signed friday and announced to the public on Saturday. This action gave Obama's health chief the power to allow hospitals to move their emergency rooms offsite. By doing so, this will help increase treatment and will also help protect non-infected patients. Philip Elliot of the associated press (Monterey Herald) states, "optimistic estimates that as many as 120 million doses of the vaccine could be available by mid-October." There have been more than 1,000 people in the United States that have died from this flu (H1N1); almost 100 of them have been children. Eleven million doses have gone out to health departments according t the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials.
Hospital drive-thrus and drive-up tent clinics have been created to screen and treat swine flu patients. This idea was created to help keep infectious patients out of the public and to also keep infected people away from other sick patients; therefore preventing new strains of swine flu. Officials have said, "The government hopes to have about 50 million doses of the sine flu vaccine out by mid-November and about 150 million in December." There isn't an exact count of how many swine flu cases there have been, because the government doesn't test everyone. But, to confirm how serious this disease is, there have been more than 20,000 hospitalizations.
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