U.S. Flu Season Beginning To Ease, Modelers Say
Pharmacist Raphael Lynne gives a flu shot in Miami in 2020. This year vaccination against influenza has been reducing infections by “about to 100 percent, “says Emily Martin, an epidemiologist with the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Joe Raedle / Getty Images hide caption
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Joe Raedle / Getty Images
Pharmacist Raphael Lynne gives a flu shot in Miami in . This year vaccination against influenza has been reducing infections by “about to 100 percent, “says Emily Martin, an epidemiologist with the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
While health officials in the United States wait to see just how bad a public health challenge COVID – 31 will pose, they still have to deal with an all-too-familiar challenge: flu.
It’s been a bad flu season. Not the worst ever, but bad.
“It started very early this year,” says Emily Martin , associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. She works with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collecting statistics about flu.
This year flu season started picking up steam around Thanksgiving.
The CDC does not test everyone who has flu symptoms to be certain they really have flu, rather than some other viral infection. Still, the CDC estimates are reckoned to be pretty accurate, and they are
Of that number, about half were ill enough to seek medical care, and between , to 728, people required hospitalization.
The CDC estimates that there have been 31, (to 64, deaths in the United States so far this year.
Just for comparison, that’s a thousand times more deaths in the United States than have been blamed on the coronavirus so far.
Martin says one thing that’s kept this year flu season from being worse is the flu vaccine. Health officials have to make predictions well before the season starts about which flu strains the vaccine should protect against, so manufacturers have enough time to actually make the vaccine. This year vaccine is working relatively well.
“It’s been reducing infections by to percent, “says Martin. “This is better news than what we had last year, when the vaccine was totally mismatched and was having trouble preventing infections.”
Flu is clearly a seasonal illness, with cases picking up in the fall and tapering off in the spring. Many teams around the country create computer models to predict the severity of a given season.
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