(October 26, 2009) President Obama's declaration of a national pandemic emergency is "no cause for alarm," reported the mainstream media throughout the weekend.

The declaration is nothing more than a "precaution," they say. "It's really more a continuation of our preparedness steps," said Anne Schuchat, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, in a USA Today story.

In other words, there's not really any emergency at all. So why declare a national emergency in the first place?

The media reports this was done to allow hospitals to bypass federal regulations concerning the setting up of large-scale triage sites -- emergency medical camps quickly constructed to deal with large numbers of sick people.

But at the same time, H1N1 isn't causing large-scale sickness. As USA Today reported, an expert on infectious disease, P.J. Brennan (the chief medical officer for the Penn Health System at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia) said, "The public ought to take some solace, some relief in this.