Maggie Fox – NBC News Sept 27, 2018
Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams receives a flu shot as Cleveland Browns offensive tackle Joe Thomas looks on. Click to enlarge
Flu killed 80,000 people this past season and put 900,000 into the hospital, making it the worst influenza season in decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday.
The numbers were shocking. Until now, CDC has said flu kills anywhere between 12,000 and 56,000 people a year, depending on how bad the flu season is, and that it puts between 250,000 and 700,000 into the hospital with serious illness. The numbers for the 2017-2018 flu season go far beyond that.
“It’s high, but it’s consistent with what we had last season,” the CDC’s flu division director, Dr. Daniel Jernigan, told NBC News.
Other doctors spoke bluntly in saying how so many people got infected and died.
“Those 80,000 people who died from flu last year? Guess what? They got it from someone. Someone gave them the flu,” Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams said at a news conference.
Those numbers included 180 children. “The majority of them were unvaccinated,” Adams said. “It’s healthy kids out there that are dying from the flu.”
Influenza activity hit a high mark early this year, and the virus was infecting many people across the country all at the same time. Usually, flu hits first in one region and then another, but this past season saw widespread flu activity all at once, for weeks on end.
“That first week in January, I said it was peaking. Then the next week I said it was peaking,” Jernigan recalled. Finally, the CDC stopped predicting a peak as the flu season continued worsening.
The CDC had already feared a severe flu season because it was the H3N2 strain that was circulating. H3N2 usually hits people over 65 the hardest. “This virus hit the population in a vulnerable spot,” Jernigan said.
The CDC does not count adult flu deaths directly, but estimates them based on the number of excess deaths during the flu season.
Adams and other leading doctors urged Americans to start getting the annual flu shots now and, as happens every September, rolled up their sleeves to get immunized for the cameras.
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