With all of the closures and stay-home orders, you’ll find this hard to believe.
But Florida is in the midst of a downturn in the severity of what is a fairly typical flu season.
At least when it comes to what laymen might consider the “regular flu,” according to the Florida Department of Health, which tracks a variety of flu viruses with the help of numbers reported to the state’s Bureau of Vital Statistics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Individual cases of the flu aren’t reported to the state unless they involve the death of a child, says Tammy Yzaguirre, public information officer for the Department of Health in Lee County.
But using a network of health care providers such as walk-in clinics, broad trends are tracked.
The flu season, like a school year or an NBA season, begins in one calendar year and ends in the next. The 2019-2020 flu season began in September 2019 and runs through mid-May 2020, putting us about two-thirds of the way through it.
COVID-19 aside, the predominant strain of the flu at work this year is called A 2009 H1N1.
“Statewide, the percentage of respiratory specimens testing positive for influenza continued to decrease. Likewise, the percent of emergency department and urgent care center visits with discharge diagnoses that include influenza or flu decreased in recent weeks. Activity in week 13 (the 13th week of the calendar year) was below an average of the past three influenza seasons for this time,” the heath department’s weekly Flu Review report states.
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Prior to the first of March, the season was tracking higher than the three-year average for the percentage of emergency room and urgent care visits that included a diagnosis of influenza.
The percentage dropped below the three-year average about the time the coronavirus pandemic began dominating the news and our daily lives, suggesting the same techniques employed to fight it — isolation, frequent hand washing, etc. — are working to slow the spread of the more familiar flu.
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The CDC cautions, though, that the presence of COVID-19 is changing people’s behavior when it comes to seeking care. That could be affecting the numbers as well.
“These changes impact data … in ways that are difficult to differentiate from changes in illness levels, therefore (the) data should be interpreted with caution,” the CDC’s FluView report states.
The number of deaths attributed to traditional flu and pneumonia in Florida during the 2019-2020 season ranges between about 200 and 300 per week.
That’s in line with the past three seasons and adds up to about 6,000 deaths.
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That will cause some to question state and local government orders for non-essential businesses to close and residents to stay home except for necessary trips.
Why all the restrictions this year, when even in a normal year, thousands die from similar illnesses?
There are important distinctions that need to be made.
The weekly statistics include deaths from pneumonia, which can be brought on by factors other than the flu.
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In places like Lee and Collier counties, where there are hospital beds and ventilators available, the restrictions aren’t there to combat a crisis that is overwhelming us.
They’re there to stave off such a crisis.
Unlike the more familiar strains of flu, there’s no vaccination against COVID-19.
There’s no proven effective treatment once its acquired.
It appears more highly contagious than other forms of the flu and while much is still to be learned, it appears its mortality rate is higher.
All of that could end up in tsunami of cases at one time swamping hospitals and medical workers.
While the number of cases of the “regular flu” is in line with previous years, COVID-19 threatens to spike beyond the health care system’s ability to cope with it, the CDC warns.
That’s makes for anything but a fairly typical flu season.
(Connect with Brent Batten at brent.batten@naplesnews.com of via Facebook.)
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April 04, 2020 at 09:09PM
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