Officialdom's mantra about swine flu - "It is overwhelmingly mild" - might seem incongruous if we knew the number of children, teens and young adults in ICU beds right now, alive only because a breathing machine has taken over for their ravaged lungs.
The heavy reliance on the word "mild" could be creating a false impression of what is actually going on and what the world may face in coming months, some experts worry.
Peter Sandman, a risk communications guru from Princeton, N.J., suggests if authorities are trying to ensure people don't panic about the new H1N1 outbreak, they are concerned about the wrong thing.
"In North America, swine-flu panic is much rarer than swine-flu deaths," Mr. Sandman says.
"The problem isn't panic or even excessive anxiety. The problem is complacency, both about what's going to happen and about what might happen."
When the new H1N1 virus burst onto the world's radar, it was, for a while, the hottest story of the 24/7 news cycle. The long-threatened pandemic, it seemed, was finally underway.
But instead of the 60-plus per cent death rate of H5N1 avian flu - seen for years as the pandemic front-runner - the wire was tripped by a seemingly wimpy virus that is causing a lot of flu, but is no viral monster.
In many places, public-health officials have bent over backwards to tamp down anticipated panic. The results? Within a few weeks, most people appeared to be convinced the pandemic was a non-event, a blip of flu activity overhyped by the sensationalist media hoard.
"When we're told that swine flu is mild, we don't think, 'It will infect a half to a third of the world population and kill a few million people, mostly young people, before it's over,' " says Mr. Sandman. "We think, 'It's like having a bad cold.' "
Well, swine flu isn't over. And it's not like a bad cold sweeping the globe.
But officials and experts are having a hard time striking the balance in messages to the public, unclear what they are dealing with now and what it might become.
"I think the problem is we don't know how to paint this picture properly," says Dr. Allison McGeer, a flu expert at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital. "Because it's perfectly true that most cases are mild. But it doesn't mean that you shouldn't worry about it."
Regular flu, as anyone who has had it knows, is no walk in the park.
And with this new flu, a small subset of people gets very sick. Their lungs are overwhelmed by an aggressive viral pneumonia one doctor described as looking like a "whiteout" on an X-ray. A number of hospitals are struggling to keep these people alive.
Generally much younger than the typical hospitalized flu patient, many of these people have been on ventilators for weeks. And every day, officials in some part of the globe announce that a 15-year-old boy, a 24-year-old woman, or an otherwise healthy pregnant woman in her third trimester, has lost the battle.
"When you look at those things, then you begin to say, 'Well, is it really accurate, is it really fair to say that this is a mild phenomenon?' " says Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the World Health Organization's top flu expert.
Dr. Fukuda and his team have been warning for some time that the unusual age pattern of severe cases, the odd out-of-season spread, and the fact that the virus is killing some previously healthy young adults makes the term moderate a more appropriate severity assessment.
That pattern, seen in previous pandemics, makes flu watchers sit up and take notice.