But you didn't say how many cases of (non-swine) flu there are each year, which makes it difficult to extract any information about the per-case fatality rate. On the other hand, if your figures are right then we can be pretty sure that swine flue is relatively mild, unless just about everyone in Germany gets flu every year. On the other other hand, (1) one thing that's unusual about the current swine flu epidemic is that it's happening out of the normal flu season, so some of the credit for the low death rate may be due to the fact that people aren't yet getting it in winter; and (2) no one is actually disputing that swine flu, as it is now, is pretty benign; the question is how likely it is that a slightly mutated version will turn up that starts killing a lot more people.