The pandemic was carefully followed by the media but with a touch of sensationalism that caused a widespread a sense of fear in the population. Health care systems and physicians were suddenly in the spotlight. In our cases all the signs and symptoms (including respiratory failure, refractory hypoxemia, leukopenia, lymphopenia, thrombocytopenia, and elevated levels of creatine kinase and hepatic aminotransferases) were consistent with critical illness due to infection with the 2009 H1N1 virus [1, 4, 5] .