Thousands of deaths linked to H1N1

(WTNH) - It appears more people have died in the U.S. from the H1N1 virus than first thought.

New numbers say 4,000 Americans have died from the swine flu and forty thousand have been hospitalized. These numbers all shot up because they're now counting people suffering from complications associated with the flu.

Meanwhile, federal health officials are having plenty of complications with the H1N1 vaccine. There's not nearly enough of it, even for people in the high risk categories, and experts say without more vaccine, the death toll will continue to grow.

"Unfortunately, the consequences of not having enough vaccine soon enough is we're going to have people who are going to necessarily get sick and some will die," said Dr Michael Osterholm, Univ. of Minnesota.

So what's the holdup? Almost all the vaccine is made by growing it in chicken eggs and manufacturers say the virus is growing slower than expected, and you can yell at those eggs all you want, they're not going to grow any faster. The one company making it in the U.S. says it hopes to deliver 75 million doses in the next 6 weeks.

In Connecticut, we've had 16 deaths related to the swine flu so far this year. That sounds terrible, the 4,000 deaths in the U.S. sounds terrible, too, but experts point out that a lot more people than that die every year from the regular, seasonal flu.