Analysis | The strain of a seasonal flu pandemic – but every month –

Laboratory technician Alejandra Sanchez met a doctor on March 11 at St. Mary’s Medical Center. (Mario Tama / Getty Images)

The flu season, which began in the fall of 2017, was particularly bad in the United States. It was estimated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that 52,000 people died from the flu season, which lasted until early 2018. An estimated 710,000 people were hospitalized with the flu.

On the plus side, although the scale was larger than normal, the wave itself was absent. The country always sees a spike in flu cases during the winter months and, in the past, hospitals have been able to brave the unexpected flu season.

The flu season was neither last winter nor this season. Countries’ efforts to contain the virus have been effective in reducing cases of the flu, but less effective in curbing the spread of the virus. Even now, when the current pandemic has left its peak caused by the Omicron variant, there have been more deaths from Covid-19 in the country after Valentine’s Day than in the entire 2017-2018 flu season. In the last two months, more people have been hospitalized than in the same years 2017-2018.

And this was especially true Bad Flu season.

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Note, we are comparing approved According to coronavirus data valued Flu data. In other words, we’re comparing the total number of laboratory-tested confirmed influenza and hospitalizations, which the CDC says are more likely to occur with Covid-19 hospitalizations. HCM only recorded about 30,000 confirmed hospitalizations for influenza in the 2017-2018 season, or fewer than the number of confirmed covid-19 hospitalizations the country saw last week.

We can directly compare these two dimensions. Below you can see the seasonal peaks in hospitalizations for influenza and how the 2017-2018 season stood out.

Here are the same numbers, plus the number of hospitalizations for Covid-19. These orange dots at the bottom of the graph are the same flu spikes seen above.

It is critically important to recognize here that while coronavirus cases rise and fall in waves, the base rate at which this number has not decreased since this data was first collected (summer 2020) is much higher than the peaks. passed. flu seasons.

Another indicator of the number of flu seasons is the number of deaths. A certain level of death from influenza and pneumonia is expected each year, increasing and decreasing with the seasons. As in the 2017-2018 season, death rates from influenza and pneumonia are well above these expectations during bad flu seasons.

But then we count the deaths from Covid-19.

Again, the loss is not only at the expected level, but has been consistently above this level for two years. During the 2017-2018 flu season, over 133,000 deaths from flu and pneumonia were reported. That’s a lower death rate from flu, pneumonia, and covid-19 than we’ve seen in the past couple of months.

Not all of these deaths occur in hospitals, but it is safe to assume that most do occur. In other words, the strain is not just about hospitals’ ability to deal with incoming patients, but also the loss of their losses, especially when many of these patients can avoid serious complications through vaccination. A layer of misinformation, ivermectin Preventing serious illness is not in vain and the burden on health care workers is increasing.

Everything is better than two months ago. This does not mean that everything is necessarily good. Nor is there any guarantee that things will continue to improve, with the new, more contagious version of the Omicron variant taking into account the growing number of cases in the country.

We all hope the worst is over. But the present is still a great tension.

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Source: Washington Post

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