Pandemic

So the World Health Organisation (WHO) has officially declared the swine flu to be a pandemic. I found this confusing at first until I understood that the WHO is referring to how much the swine flu has spread around the world. Pandemic refers to geographic distribution, not severity.

Then it occurred to me that this out break is indistinguishable from normal seasonal flu to my untrained eyes. The distribution is the same as normal seasonal flu, perhaps even lower since no one closes schools for seasonal flu for example. The fatality rate of swine flu is not that high, 141 in 30000 confirmed cases so far. That's only 0.4% compared to seasonal flu's fatality rate of 10-16 percent using the Wikipedia infection rates.

So, why doesn't the WHO declare pandemics for seasonal flu every year? It meets all the criterion, doesn't it? I'm confused again. What am I missing?