If you feel ill with swine flu symptoms, call your doctor and stay home until your fever has been gone for 24 hours.

Swine flu news might make you hide under a blanket, but you're better off just getting some sleep.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—We've been bombarded by swine flu announcements lately, ranging from school and work closure and attendance guidelines to a new, alarming government report that raises the possibility of up to 90,000 swine flu deaths in this country alone.

THE DETAILS: The report, from the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, estimates the virus will infect 30 to 50 percent of the U.S. population, with children and young adults accounting for a bulk of the deaths. But don't panic. "That's the most extreme thing that the virus might do in the population, but that is not a likely event," says flu expert William Schaffner, MD, chair of the department of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical School and president-elect of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. "The numbers that were presented are undoubtedly a worst-case scenario. At the moment, the severity of the virus and illness it produces leads us to believe that worst-case scenario is not likely. We'll take those numbers with a large grain of salt."

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) appears to agree. An article in Wednesday's New York Times quoted Anne Schuchat, MD, CDC's director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases as saying, "We don’t necessarily see this as a likely scenario." The paper quoted another source from the agency saying, "Look, if the virus keeps behaving the way it is now, I don’t think anyone here expects anything like 90,000 deaths.” Seasonal flu generally kills about 36,000 people a year in the U.S.; typically, most deaths are among people older than 65.