State sees season’s first flu death

Arkansas reported its first influenza death in the 2020-21 season, according to a weekly Health Department report.

A person over age 65 died of the flu during the week ending Oct. 24, the report said. The person’s diagnosis was confirmed using a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test.

No other information about the person, such as gender or county of residence, was included in the publication. That’s typical of Health Department reports concerning groups of fewer than five patients, to preserve the patients’ privacy.

Flu season began in late September. Since that time, Arkansas health providers reported 118 positive flu tests to an online database.

According to the report, 12 people with positive flu tests were hospitalized since late last month. No nursing homes reported outbreaks.

The Health Department numbers show only a small fraction of flu cases or “disease burden,” the report said, because the database and the state’s public health agency report only positive tests, hospitalizations, outbreaks and deaths. They don’t report, for example, people who are sick with the flu but aren’t tested or treated by a doctor.

During the 2019-20 flu season, 118 Arkansans died of the flu.

That comprises deaths that occurred from the fall of 2019 through April of this year, when the last deaths were reported. Most of those fatalities — 72 — were in people over age 65, data show.

By comparison, 1,875 people in Arkansas have died of covid-19 since the state reported its first pandemic deaths in late March.

Health officials and experts have stressed the importance of getting flu shots this season to reduce strain on hospitals and avoid the possibility of concurrent infections with covid-19 and the flu.

Nationally, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 22,000 people in the U.S. died from flu during last year’s season.