12 Flu Victims Have Died, and Ill May Total 550,000

New York City officials on Wednesday reported the deaths of three more people with swine flu, and estimated that more than half a million New Yorkers may have become sick from the virus.

The latest deaths bring the city’s total to 12 since the outbreak began in late April. The city health department said that one of the latest victims was 30 to 39 years old, one was 50 to 59 years old and one was over 65.

The city also announced 102 new hospitalizations since its last report on Monday, bringing the total hospitalizations to 530.

Dr. Don Weiss, director of surveillance for the Bureau of Communicable Disease, said that what looked like a spike in hospitalizations actually represented catching up from a lag in reporting over the weekend. He said that hospitalizations were running at the rate of 35 to 40 a day, and “don’t appear to be going up or down appreciably.”

Health officials said that in a telephone poll of New Yorkers, 6.9 percent of those surveyed reported having flulike illness, like fever and cough or a sore throat, between May 1 and May 20.

Extrapolated to the general population, that would mean that about 550,000 people could have become sick with the virus. The 500 who have been hospitalized make up a tiny proportion — about one-tenth of 1 percent — of those who became ill, an indication of how mild the virus generally has been, officials said.

“The findings don’t tell us exactly how many New Yorkers have had H1N1 influenza,” Dr. Thomas A. Farley, the city’s new health commissioner, said in a statement. “But they suggest it has been widespread and mild in most people.”

The survey of 1,005 households found that the prevalence of flulike illness was highest in Queens, where the outbreak began, with 9.4 percent, and lowest in Manhattan and the Bronx with just below 4 percent.

Officials cautioned that some of those who reported flulike symptoms may have had seasonal flu, strep throat or similar illnesses.

In an ordinary flu season, Dr. Weiss said, 5 to 20 percent of the population becomes ill, and using a conservative estimate of 10 percent of the population, that would be 800,000 people.

The city’s descriptions of those with swine flu who have died have become progressively vaguer, dropping information like exact age, sex and home borough. By Wednesday, the city had stopped saying if victims had an underlying health problem that put them at more risk from the virus.

Jessica Scaperotti, a health department spokeswoman, said the city had become less specific to guard patient confidentiality, but also because the disease had become so widespread that officials were more interested in the big picture. “We’re not really focused on individual cases,” she said.