Flu Season Hits In The US After A Slow Start

Flu Season Hits In The US After A Slow Start
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Flu season strikes the United States after a slow start. The excellent news would be that the specialists predict a harmless influenza season this year. However, some believe that’s too early for the virologists to pronounce since anything can change fast. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly report, in the last seven days of the previous year, only 4 percent of the visits to the doctor were linked to flu-like symptoms. That’s okay, the doctors say.

However, the new flu season affected the southern US, from South Carolina to New Mexico, and even up to Utah the most, so far. Also, another pocket of virulence is emerging on the East Coast, in New Jersey and New York City.

“It’s too soon to say what direction it will go,” stated CDC’s Lynnette Brammer. She added, though, that influenza is usually peaking between December and February. “We know right now we are going up, we just don’t know when it will start coming back down,” she added.

Flu Season Hits In The US After A Slow Start

According to the CDC, this year’s flu season started slowly, and it’s not peaking as fast as it did in 2017-2018. Also, the H1N1 strain is prevalent this year, and that’s excellent news, whatsoever, as this influenza strain is not affecting older adults, and it is more vulnerable to vaccination. However, that is a deadly flu strain for children, to some extent.

“Last year was a record bad year. Our mortality estimate was one of the highest, if not the highest, we’ve seen,” said Lynette Brammer.

“It wasn’t that it was a particularly bad virus that if you got it, you were more likely to die than in previous years. There were just a lot more cases. When you have a lot more people get sick, you have more people who are hospitalized and more people who die,” Brammer concluded.


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