It’s not too late to get it now.
Flu season is off to a rough start this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While the virus arrived as expected, cases are rising faster, compared with previous years.
Last week, more than 19,000 patients with influenza were admitted to hospitals, up about 10,000 from the previous week, according to new CDC data. To date, the CDC estimates at least 7.5 million people have been sickened, and over 3,100 people have died from the flu.
The surge seems to be driven primarily by a new strain of the virus — subclade K of influenza A(H3N2) — that emerged in Australia over the summer.
“Anywhere we detect this virus, you can see a large surge of influenza cases coming afterwards,” says Andrew Pekosz, a virologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In the U.S., “the timing is not that much different from other flu seasons, but the number of cases, and how quickly those cases are increasing is something that is not usually seen this time of year.”
New York has been hit especially hard, with state health officials announcing over 71,000 cases last week — the most cases ever recorded in a single week in the state. But other states are seeing high levels of flu activity, particularly in the northeast, midwest and south.
“The map is mostly red,” says Pekosz, indicating high levels of disease that will likely increase over the coming weeks.
“When you’re in the middle of seeing the curve start to go up, we just don’t have any sense of where it’s going to stop,” he says. “That’s the big concern in most of the medical communities right now.”
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There are some concerns that this season’s flu vaccine may not be a perfect match to the new strain, given it emerged after the formulation was decided last February. “I think we’re going to have a mismatch between the strain circulating and the vaccine,” says Demetre Daskalakis, who led the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at CDC until he resigned in August. “But the vaccine is still the best protection we have, even if it’s imperfect protection.”
Preliminary data from the United Kingdom, which saw an early surge of flu this year, suggests the vaccine is about 30 to 40% effective at preventing hospitalization in adults. “Those numbers are in line with what you would typically see,” says Krammer, though he stresses those are preliminary estimates.
My wife and I both came down with the flu last year while on a trip. Thankfully, as we are both regular flu shot receivers, it was pretty mild and all it meant was missing out on a couple of days’ worth of sightseeing. I’ve been getting annual flu shots since I was a grad student and that was the first time I think I’d ever had the flu. Anyway, getting the shot is your best bet to reduce your odds of infection and making any case you do get less severe. Your old friend the N-95 or K-95 face mask is also a good strategy if you’re in a crowd. I’d wear a mask if I were going to be flying anywhere right now. Stay well, y’all.