With this year’s flu season now the most intense since the swine flu pandemic nearly a decade ago and still growing more deadly, the number of people succumbing to the virus keeps ramping up.
And, the New York Times reports, even more worrisome to health officials is that the hospitalization rate, which is a predictor of the death rate, has just jumped and is now on track to equal or surpass that of the 2014-2015 flu season. In that year, the Times reports, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates, 34 million Americans got the flu, 710,000 were hospitalized and about 56,000 died.
“We’ll expect something around those numbers,” Dr. Daniel B. Jernigan, director of the CDC’s influenza division, told the paper on Friday.
Last week, the deaths of seven children were reported to the CDC, the reports said, bringing this season’s total to 37. Since an accurate count of fatalities can take months to assemble, considering many flu deaths occur outside hospitals, the true toll could be twice as high, officials said. (In 2014-2015, there were 148 pediatric deaths — which the agency tracks individually, not by estimates as it does with death totals.)
This season’s flu bug is hitting every pocket of the continental United States, the first time that has happened in the 13 years of the CDC’s current tracking system. And the death toll continues to climb, with more and more stories like the one from Clay Township, Michigan, where a 12-year-old Michigan boy died just 48 hours after showing flu-like symptoms that started with him vomiting during dinner.
According to the health-news website STAT, there’s a “difference between an active flu season — when a large number of people get sick — and a severe season, when the numbers of people hospitalized for flu or who die from the infection are unusually high. It can be hard to tell in real time where a flu season will fall on the severity scale, because sometimes reports of influenza hospitalization and deaths — especially deaths among children — lag.”
The report goes on to say that “this year is starting to look like a severe season, and maybe more severe than last year, which was also bad, said Dr. Dan Jernigan, head of CDC’s influenza division. ‘There’s lots of flu in lots of places,’ he said.”
CNN reported that as of this past Friday, Jernigan said the “this is the first year we’ve had the entire continental US at the same level (of flu activity) at the same time.” It has been an early flu season that seems to be peaking now, he said, with a 5.8% increase in laboratory-confirmed cases this week over last.