By Michael Soltys, Buenos Aires Herald Senior Editor.

Within a week Argentina has veered from one extreme of not allowing a swine flu epidemic to stand in the way of elections to total alarmism - which of the two extremes is more justified? At government level everything has changed with a six-digit estimate of patients now officially admitted as against just 1,587 only six days previously (even if sticking stubbornly to an official death toll of 44 on Thursday) and a brand-new Health Minister Juan Luis Manzur who very obviously has this pandemic at the top of his mind - at inferior levels of jurisdiction we have seen an escalating suspension of mass events provincially and municipally along with the total closure of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and schools almost everywhere. In large measure the general public has been ahead of the politicians (not for the first time in Argentine experience) with sharply thinning numbers in shopping malls, restaurants, entertainments and even workplaces (although perhaps less so in mass transport).

Yet this creeping paralysis of public life threatens to knock at least a couple of points of growth off an already faltering economy (unless fewer people in shops etc. are already a symptom of recession) and the question then arises as to whether the panic is justified in view of the economic damage caused. After all, to place swine flu in another perspective, the death toll thus far is the equivalent of just a couple of days of road carnage (by the same token, it could be pointed out that in Mexico where this pandemic began, total fatalities by the start of July amounted to 119 whereas drug gangland slayings in June alone totalled 769). Yet pursuing this logic would be to echo the late general Leopoldo Galtieri who pointed out with total factual accuracy that more Argentines died on the roads in 1982 than in the South Atlantic War he so recklessly started.

The fact is that we do not know the truth between the two extremes - between the 2,500-plus confirmed cases and the suspected 100,000 there is a multitude of viral variants as much as sins - but we have both the right and the duty to know. Regardless of whether the final decision is to close down the country entirely (as more or less happened in Mexico) or to fight the epidemic with a basic minimum of precautions, we should have a right to expect both consistency (with no double standards and arbitrary discrimination between mass events) and full co-ordination between the health authorities.