It’s not every day you open up the newspaper, read that the administration’s science advisers have issued a report warning that 90,000 people may perish in an impending epidemic — and then breathe a sigh of relief. The sigh was possible because the Centers for Disease Control had cleaned up after the White House, explaining that the report’s eye-popping figure was “not a prediction,” merely a planning scenario. But by the time the CDC had set the record straight, hundreds of news stories had already publicized the sensational claim.

The report came from the same administration whose vice president terrified the public by suggesting that Americans avoid confined spaces, airplanes, and public transportation because of swine flu, and later mused about shuttering the nation’s schools. Clearly, this White House should not be your go-to source for epidemiological information.

But the knowledge that the White House report was bunk was not the only reason for my relief. It happened that I had just endured the swine flu and could take some solace in the fact that, thanks to my ordeal, the rest of my family was much less likely to catch this particular plague. My experience leaves me duty-bound to deliver a simple message to America: Don’t panic — please. And never, ever, ever listen to Joe Biden.

My flu came on out of nowhere one weekend. I felt unnaturally sluggish but plunged ahead with work and family the best I could. On Tuesday evening I settled in to watch the president’s prime-time press conference on health care. Suddenly I began to feel cold — and it wasn’t just Obama’s performance. I grabbed a down comforter and lay down on the couch, a most unusual thing to do in July in Washington, D.C., when the hum of the struggling air conditioner sounds like a small voice repeating, “I think I can, I think I can.” Unless you were on the Shackleton expedition, don’t bother trying to understand how cold I felt that evening. This feeling was promptly followed by shivering, and by “shivering” I mean that my whole body shook like that machine in the back of the hardware store that mixes paint. I drifted in and out of consciousness as the president droned on. (I had the worst fever dream: The federal government was trying to exert control over 17 percent of the economy.)

Finally I stopped shaking and summoned the will to heave the comforter off me in one mighty effort. My wife, seeing me stir, bustled over to the couch. She applied the back of her hand to my forehead, then retrieved a digital thermometer from the medicine cabinet to confirm what I had already read on her face — my temperature was just shy of 103 degrees. After I took a cold shower the fever broke and I made several dismissive comments about my condition, all of which failed to uncock my wife’s skeptical eyebrow. I went to bed around midnight, and a few hours later my wife awoke to find her semi-somnambulant husband looming over her side of the bed, demanding more blankets. The chills had returned and, soon, so had the fever.

At this point it was clear my attempts at manly stoicism were failing to impress my wife. I soon found myself in an immediate-care clinic. The doctor listened to my tale of woe and performed a throat swab and a battery of other tests. My blood pressure and pulse were worryingly low, while my breathing rate was high.

“In my clinical diagnosis,” said the doc, “you have Influenza A.” So I had the flu. No big deal, right? “And I don’t want to alarm you, but you have the flu in July. It’s not flu season.” My slowly beating heart fluttered a bit with anticipation. “Nearly all of the cases of flu we are seeing right now are swine flu.”

Prior to my diagnosis, I had thought that swine flu was yet another overhyped media scare, like SARS, avian flu, flesh-eating bacteria, and the demise of Jon and Kate Gosselin’s marriage. For a moment, I thought I’d won the pathological lottery. But it turns out that swine flu is just another form of the same flu we all survive every winter. It is already much more common than people realize, and not so dangerous as we’ve been led to believe. The good news is that, while swine flu is real and spreading, it isn’t especially threatening to otherwise healthy adults. Symptoms typically last a week. (Mine lasted a bit longer.)

The bad news is that there’s no real treatment for it, and the really bad news is that swine flu is much more contagious than the typical variety. “Do you live alone?” the doc asked. I told her I had a wife and two kids. She asked how old my children were. “The youngest is two months” — her eyes got very wide — “and the other is almost two.”

“Do you have relatives you could stay with?” she asked. That wasn’t an option. She looked concerned but told me I could go home — provided I didn’t sleep in the same bed as my wife, steered clear of my kids, and generally avoided everybody. She contributed further to my worry by informing me that the flu is most contagious just before symptoms manifest themselves — I’d been contagious for days. If anyone else in my family, especially the baby, appeared to be even remotely sick, I was to get him to a doctor immediately.

I should at this point make a confession: I cannot say for certain that I had the swine flu. The doctor told me that I wasn’t sick enough to justify a trip to the hospital for the tests that would confirm her diagnosis. The disease has become commonplace enough that it no longer warrants the extra attention. The day after my diagnosis, I read that both the Washington Post and National Geographic had sent out memos informing staff that employees had contracted swine flu. Our neighborhood e-mail list reported that people living nearby were afflicted. But I didn’t dismiss the doctor’s warnings.

And so began my exile. The “spare bedroom” in our house is a glorified storage closet, and curling up my weakened, six-foot-five-inch frame on our salvaged trundle bed while my wife sprawled across our new W Hotels Queen-Size Plush-Top Mattress hardly seemed fair. But far worse than the illness was not having any contact with my wife or children for the next week. During that time, I had very little energy, though ibuprofen helped with the fever and I had only one more bout of chills. I slept a lot and read quite a few cheap paperbacks. Eventually, I got better. More important, my wife and kids stayed healthy.

Meanwhile, outside my tiny quarantine ward, word got around that I had the swine flu. Fast. Most people were oddly incredulous. A friend on Twitter put it distinctively: “Someone I know has The Oink? For reals?” I received several frantic phone calls from people expressing grave concern about my health. I had to patiently explain many times over that, yes, I had swine flu, but, no, it was not a serious threat to my health. For all the media attention, the persistent ignorance about swine flu is astounding.

After I posted a short note about my affliction on National Review Online that explained some of the basics of swine flu, e-mails thanking me poured in. Almost all were from people who had contracted the disease. The most memorable was from a mother whose young twins had been infected; in response, her co-workers had said several mean things and avoided her like — what else? — the plague, even long after there was no further cause for concern about contagion.

It is increasingly likely that swine flu will affect you or somebody you know. The best tactic is commonsense prevention: Wash your hands, stay home if you’re feeling sick, and, above all, don’t put off seeing a doctor. The flu is a common affliction and it’s nothing to fear, but in rare cases it develops into something very serious. Regular old influenza kills thousands around the world every year and has been doing so since long before swine flu arrived on the scene.

That said, it’s been more than a month and people still come up to me as if I’d survived a trip down Niagara Falls in a barrel. It’s pretty obvious that Chicken Little warnings from the media and the government aren’t helping. My hope is that, once the public gets a handle on swine flu, the White House science advisers will be able to spend their time more productively. Maybe they can start by issuing a report on whatever’s wrong with Joe Biden.