We have gone from near-panic over the emergence of swine flu, to dismissing it as hype.

On May 1, the World Health Organization reported only 331 cases of swine flu worldwide, but still declared the crisis to be at level 5 alert on a scale of 6, meaning that this strain of flu might be considered an all-out pandemic if the numbers keep rising.

On the same day, CNBC reported that flu masks were “flying off the shelves,” and soon after, China quarantined Mexican visitors.

Now, just a few days later, with the virulence of the virus apparently less than originally feared, the federal government has relaxed its attitude toward school closings and the media is asking whether it was all hype. The public has quickly become so blasé that, only a few days after Vice President Biden sounded an off-message travel alarm, “Cinco de Swino” parties were held in Washington and other U.S. cities.

Of course, if it was hype, surely the media was a main culprit. And it remains possible that this ever-mutating virus will have the last laugh, returning to the virulence it seemed to display earlier in Mexico.

But that’s not what I’m thinking about right now. What fascinates me is the similarity between the challenge the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health authorities faced in those first few hours, and the challenge we all face in the first moments of what could either be an emerging crisis or a big nothing.

The similarity is especially striking in the world of instantaneous communication. It’s with good reason that we now call the spread of information “viral.”

The only chance, if one exists at all, to contain the spread of a virus, real or virtual, is at the earliest possible stage. The pressure to make snap decisions, when information is incomplete and maybe even plain wrong, is enormous.

And, like real viruses, a virtual virus may lie dormant in an obscure blog or web page, only to burst out weeks later without warning when a YouTube video goes viral or a mainstream media outlet reports on it.

Calibrating the ideal response to a dimly understood threat under enormous time pressure, with potentially grave consequences for either over- or under-reaction. Then recalibrating that response each day, if not hourly, as the situation unfolds.

That’s the CDC’s difficult job. And, though the stakes may be different, it is often ours, and the world of epidemiology may have things to teach crisis managers in other fields. While its most obvious application to crisis management involves product-induced illness, such as salmonella poisoning or environmentally caused illness, epidemiological models may also prove useful in predicting and coping with the early stages of the viral spread of information itself.

Suprisingly, there is relatively little research in the area. Two professors – Franklin University’s Douglas K. Ross and Steven R. Ash at the University of Akron – have done some:

• Ash, S. and Ross, D. (2004). “Crisis management through the lens of epidemiology.” Business Horizons, 47(3), 49 – 57 (2004)
• “The Organic Organization: The Juxtaposition of Epidemiology and Crisis Management,” Proceedings: The Mountain Plains Management Conference, Denver, CO. (1998, with H. Bingham)

I’ll return to this subject soon. But for now, I’ll end with a few questions: As professionals who are called upon to advise on crisis response, what can we learn from the government’s response to the swine flu outbreak so far? From the media’s and the blogosphere’s? From our own?