U.S. flu season is more severe than it has been in 13 years --CDC

So far, this flu season is more severe than it has been in 13 years The flu has hospitalized a record number of people this season, underscoring the potential for a perilous winter of respiratory viruses with covid-19 and RSV. Lena H. Sun Washington Post

Influenza is hitting the United States unusually early and hard, already hospitalizing a record number of people at this point in the season in more than a decade and underscoring the potential for a perilous winter of respiratory viruses, according to federal health data released Friday.

While flu season is usually between October and May, peaking in December and January, it’s arrived about six weeks earlier this year with uncharacteristically high illness. There have already been at least 880,000 cases of lab-confirmed influenza illness, 6,900 hospitalizations and 360 flu-related deaths nationally, according to data released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One pediatric death has also been reported.

Not since the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic has there been such a high burden of flu, a metric the CDC uses to estimate a season’s severity based on laboratory-confirmed cases, doctor visits, hospitalizations and deaths.

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Activity is high in the U.S. south and southeast, and is starting to move up the Atlantic coast.

...So far, flu vaccination rates in the United States are lower than they have been at this point in the season in the past few years. About 128 million doses of flu vaccine have been distributed so far, compared with 139 million at this point last year and 154 million the year before, according to the CDC.

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