Aug. 16: Nearly 100 times more Britons caught swine flu in the past three weeks than the total incidence figure in India. America’s death toll is 19 times higher than India’s.

Yet the panic in India appears deeper, with people wearing masks in many places despite government advice that such cover is meant only for patients and caregivers; and all schools, cinemas and malls shut for three to seven days in Pune.

The UK department of health sent a reassuring message to India on Thursday, echoing what Indian officials too are saying: “There is no need to panic — in the vast majority of cases it is a mild form of flu.”

“There is no reason to shut every school,” the UK health department spokesman said. “We have done it on a case-by-case basis with the decisions taken at local level.”

The Barack Obama administration has told America’s schools they are expected to close in only three situations (see chart).

In India, the worst knee-jerk reaction had come a day after the country reported the first swine flu death: the government asked everyone with fever and cough to report at a small number of designated hospitals. The advisory — which created chaos, led to lathi-charges at some places and probably helped the infection spread — has now been withdrawn.

But the panic has stayed. On Friday, two people who died of pneumonia were wrongly declared swine flu victims. Yesterday, rumours of a flu death swirled in Hyderabad after a 36-year-old man died at Chest Hospital before the authorities clarified he had died of other causes.

The danger of overreaction is underscored by the tragic death of Jasvir Kaur Gill, 48, in Leicester, who was given a telephone diagnosis of swine flu and told to take Tamiflu after suffering from a sore throat and vomiting.

In 12 hours, the mother of three collapsed from a heart attack and died in hospital four days later. What she really had was meningitis.

Her son Sukhvinder Gill, 25, said: “Everything these days seems to be about swine flu. You’ve got a sore throat, they tell you to take Tamiflu; you’ve got a headache, they tell you to take Tamiflu. Everyone seems to be (going) ‘swine flu, swine flu, swine flu’.”

The panic is “a vastly overblown response to a natural event”, said Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University and recent winner of the Royal Society’s Rosalind Franklin Award given to women scientists.

“It is no more virulent than any other flu. It has only been perceived as being out of the ordinary because we now have the sequencing tool that allows us to see that this is a newcomer,” she said. “It is not a real newcomer. This is a flu which hasn’t been around for a while. It is coming back. That is true of most normal flus.”

Not panicking does not mean governments can afford to be complacent — swine flu has not gone away. Still, in Britain, the infection rate has been falling: from 110,000 new cases the week ended July 26 to 30,000 the following week to and 25,000 the week ended August 9. Britain now plans to reduce the number of flu call-centre staff from 1,600 to less than 600 by August 23.

The US, realising that an aware public is the best defence against the pandemic, is focusing on spreading the simple word. An example: cough into your sleeve or your arm so the palms are clean when you shake hands or touch objects that may be touched by others.

Richard Besser, who was head of the Centre for Disease Control when swine flu first appeared in the US, said: “One of the things we learned is that school closure as a means of decreasing transmission will only be effective if we have systems in place to support people doing the right thing.”

To be fair, like India, the US and the UK too had been gripped by panic when they were first struck by the H1N1 virus in April (the longer exposure partly explains the higher incidence figures).

On July 16, when the death toll was 29 in Britain, reports said the count could rise as high as 65,000. Today, front-page swine flu stories are conspicuous by their absence.

America too witnessed panic school closures, just like in India, but is now better prepared and wiser through experience. On April 30, when only 109 cases had been reported nationwide, Vice-President Joe Biden had raised panic to its zenith when he advised Americans against using public transport in cities or taking domestic commercial flights. He suggested schools should be closed across America.

Biden’s remarks caused an uproar. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg moved swiftly to damp down fears, saying: “I feel perfectly safe on the subway. I take the subway every day.”

Many other US politicians, however, politicised the swine flu invasion, which came from across the country’s southern borders.

Senators and House of Representatives members from border states, where illegal immigration is a volatile issue, demanded closing the border with Mexico, although experts say it’s not clear — and may never be — where the pandemic started. Xenophobes used the disease to fan the flames of racial hatred, which also contributed to alarm.

Many countries suspended all flights from Mexico. China stopped pork imports from Mexico. Obama, though, took the sensible but unpopular position that shutting the border “would be akin to closing the barn door after the horses are out, because we already have cases here in the US”.

In Israel, the name of the disease itself led to frenzied religious debate. That followed a statement by the ultra-orthodox deputy health minister of Israel, Yakov Litzman, that calling swine flu by its common name is “religiously sensitive”. “We will call it Mexican flu,” Litzman said. “We won’t call it swine flu.”