NEW DELHI, India — The streets of the western city of Pune were half-empty, schools in Mumbai were ordered closed, and people suffering aches flooded hospitals across the country as India confronted dueling outbreaks of swine flu and swine-flu panic.
Twenty-one people have died from the flu here, the government said Friday, and 1,390 have been confirmed infected in this nation of 1.2 billion people. But fear of the flu has outpaced the virus itself.
“The amount of frenzy or hysteria is totally disproportionate to the overall reality of the disease,” Dr. Jai Narain, the head of the regional communicable disease office for the World Health Organization, said Friday.
Reports of swine flu have dominated India’s 24-hour news channels. That in turn has helped whip the public into a frenzy, even in cities with relatively few cases of flu.
In New Delhi, where no deaths have been reported, people have begun wearing surgical masks in the street. In Lucknow, parents demanded that their children be tested.
In Mumbai, the country’s financial capital, the government closed all schools and movie theaters, hammering the Bollywood film industry over the Independence Day holiday weekend.
In response, officials have set up testing centers and will increase its Tamiflu stocks.
Officials also asked people to stop wearing masks unless they or a family member are infected.
