A rush on a North County emergency room has the county health officer asking for calm, following San Diego's first death related to swine flu.
Late Wednesday night, eighty people crowded into the ER of Escondido's Palomar Medical Center. Seventy-five percent of them complained of flu-like symptoms. This was the same hospital where a 20 year old woman died on Monday of complications related to swine flu.
A spokesman for the hospital says they set up a special triage tent to deal with the rush of flu patients. In response, county health officer Wilma Wooten publicly asked San Diego residents to remain calm. She says she does expects to see more swine flu cases, and she expects to see more deaths. But Wooten said the H1N1 virus is not highly contagious. She urged people with mild symptoms to contact their primary care doctors, not go to the emergency room. Wooten added that another San Diego county resident, suspected of having died with swine flu, tested negative for the flu.
