Rampant flu taking toll — 14 die, scores of outbreaks
This flu season is shaping up to be among the worst in a decade, with more people infected far earlier than usual and more of them ending up hospitalized, state public health workers said Friday.
California has recorded 14 flu-related deaths in people under age 65 — a marker for the severity of a flu season — including the death of a Santa Clara County resident announced Friday. That’s about normal for this date, officials said.
But other markers of severity are much higher than usual, the state said. Hospitalization rates for flu-related causes are at their highest level in more than a decade, excluding the H1N1 pandemic in 2009 that caused extremely widespread illness.
The state has also seen 83 flu outbreaks so far, twice as many as in a typical year. Most outbreaks have occurred at longterm care centers.
“We have lots of people getting the flu, and it’s causing a lot of hospitalizations. That’s notable,” said Dr. James Watt, chief
of the division of communicable disease control at the California Department of Public Health.
Bay Area public health and infectious disease experts said urgent care centers have been busier than usual and that they’ve seen increased hospitalizations and more calls to advice nurses and other help lines.
Dr. Randy Bergen, a pediatric infectious disease expert at Kaiser Permanente in Walnut Creek, has been involved with Kaiser’s Northern California internal flu surveillance program for more than a decade.
“These are the highest rates of flu positives we’ve seen,” except for the 2009 epidemic, he said.
In a typical year, when patients with influenzalike symptoms get tested for the flu, about 20 to 30 percent will come back positive at the peak of the season. Two weeks ago, 39 percent were positive, and that rate was still in the high 30s last week, Bergen said.
That means that if someone now has symptoms like fever, cough, sore throat and overall achiness, he or she probably has the flu.
Public health officials can’t yet say for sure why this season is worse than usual, but it probably has to do with the strain that’s circulating widely, known as influenza A, subtype H3N2. That type is known to produce more serious symptoms, especially among the elderly.
“With this flu I’ve seen some healthy people developing pneumonia and require hospitalization,” said Dr. Jeffrey Leinen, medical director for urgent care at Sutter East Bay Medical Foundation. “Historically, that would be a sign that it’s a virulent strain.”
Though people who think they have the flu should not automatically go to their doctor’s office or an urgent care center — a phone call will usually suffice — they should get checked out if they experience more severe or long-term symptoms, Leinen said.
Such symptoms include shortness of breath, chest pain or a serious illness that lasts longer than four or five days.
Public health officials said this year’s flu vaccine appears to be a good match for the strains of virus circulating. That the state is still seeing widespread, severe illness is not because the vaccine isn’t working, but because not enough people are getting it, and because the vaccine isn’t as effective as doctors would like.
“Unfortunately, the vaccine is not perfect,” Bergen said. “We’re not really seeing a failure of the vaccine, we’re more seeing a vaccine that isn’t 100 percent effective.”
Bergen and others said people who haven’t yet been vaccinated should still get their flu shot. It’s not clear if the flu has peaked yet in the Bay Area, but even if it has, it’s clearly still circulating widely, said Dr. Susan Philip, director of disease prevention and control with the San Francisco Public Health Department.
“In terms of precautions, they may be more important this year than usual, because you’re more likely to encounter the flu,” Philip said.