A NEW website to diagnose people with swine flu is experiencing “unprecedented demand”, the Government said last night.
The system, which launched at 3pm yesterday, was receiving 2,600 hits per second – or 9.3m hits per hour – at around 5pm.
The website crashed within minutes of launching but appeared to be running normally a short time later.
However, the Government admitted it was having to increase capacity due to demand.
It comes after new figures showed there were an estimated 100,000 new cases of swine flu last week – around double the 55,000 in the previous week.
A spokeswoman for the Department of Health insisted that the website for the National Pandemic Flu Service “has not crashed”.
She said: “It is experiencing unprecedented demand with 2,600 hits per second, equivalent to 9.3m hits per hour.”
The Government’s Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, said he suspected the problems with the website were caused by people logging on out of “curiosity”.
He told BBC Radio 4’s PM programme that it was “rather implausible to think that there might be tens of thousands of people with flu waiting within a one-hour period to all get on and assess their symptoms”.
Sir Liam said: “I think probably quite a few members of the public are logging on for curiosity to see how the system works, to gather information.”
Sir Liam said he was trusting the public not to abuse the system and claim the antiviral Tamiflu when they were not sick.
Liberal Democrat health spokesman Norman Lamb said: “This is obviously very worrying and raises serious questions about the robustness of the pandemic flu system.
“It is absolutely vital that the public have access to a reliable source of information on swine flu to provide reassurance and to take the pressure off GPs’ surgeries.”
Sir Liam said the number of deaths in England has been provisionally validated as 26, the same figure as last week, after medical experts studied the reason for each death which was suspected to be linked to swine flu.
The number of people in hospital has risen by nearly a third (29%) to 840, but showed a slowdown from the 95% rise seen the previous week.
The number of people with the virus in intensive care rose by 19%, from 53 to 63.
