How many died from the Flu last season?

What You Should Know for the 2017-2018 Influenza Season

How many people died from flu during the 2017-2018 season?
While flu deaths in children are reported to CDC, flu deaths in adults are not nationally notifiable. In order to monitor influenza related deaths in all age groups, CDC tracks pneumonia and influenza (P&I)-attributed deaths through the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) Mortality Reporting System. This system tracks the proportion of death certificates processed that list pneumonia or influenza as the underlying or contributing cause of death. This system provides an overall indication of whether flu-associated deaths are elevated, but does not provide an exact number of how many people died from flu.

During the 2017-2018 season, the percentage of deaths attributed to pneumonia and influenza (P&I) was at or above the epidemic threshold for 16 consecutive weeks. During the past five seasons, the average number of weeks this indicator was above threshold was 11 (range of 7 to 15 weeks). Nationally, mortality attributed to P&I exceeded 10.0% for four consecutive weeks, peaking at 10.8% during the week ending January 20, 2018.

As it does for the numbers of flu cases, doctor’s visits and hospitalizations, CDC also estimates deaths in the United States using mathematical modeling. CDC estimates that from 2010-2011 to 2013-2014, influenza-associated deaths in the United States ranged from a low of 12,000 (during 2011-2012) to a high of 56,000 (during 2012-2013). Death certificate data and weekly influenza virus surveillance information was used to estimate how many flu-related deaths occurred among people whose underlying cause of death on their death certificate included respiratory or circulatory causes. For more information, see Estimating Seasonal Influenza-Associated Deaths in the United States and CDC’s Disease Burden of Influenza page.

For more information, see Overview of Influenza Surveillance in the United States, “Mortality Surveillance.”

How many children died from flu during the 2017-2018 season?
As of October 6, 2018, a total of 183 pediatric deaths had been reported to CDC during the 2017-2018 season. This number exceeds the previously highest number of flu-associated deaths in children reported during a regular flu season (171 during the 2012-2013 season). Approximately 80% of these deaths occurred in children who had not received a flu vaccination this season. For the most recent data and more information visit FluView: Influenza-Associated Pediatric Mortality.

Since flu-associated deaths in children became a nationally notifiable condition in 2004, the total number of flu-associated deaths among children during one season has ranged from 37 (during the 2011-2012 season) to 183 (during the 2017-18 season, as of October 6); this excludes the 2009 pandemic, when 358 pediatric deaths from April 15, 2009 through October 2, 2010 were reported to CDC.

How many people were hospitalized from flu during the 2017-2018 season?
From October 1, 2017 through April 28, 2018, 30,453 laboratory-confirmed influenza-related hospitalizations were reported through the Influenza Hospitalization Surveillance Network (FluSurv-NET), which covers approximately 9% of the U.S. population. People 65 years and older accounted for approximately 58% of reported influenza-associated hospitalizations. Overall hospitalization rates (all ages) during 2017-2018 were the highest ever recorded in this surveillance system, breaking the previously recorded high recorded during 2014-2015; a high severity H3N2-predominant season when CDC estimates that hospitalizations captured through FluSurv-NET translated into a total of 710,000 flu hospitalizations that seasons. (For more information on these estimates, see CDC’s Disease Burden of Influenza page.) Estimates on the total number of flu-related hospitalizations during 2017-2018 will be available in fall 2018.

What flu viruses circulated during the 2017-2018 season?
Influenza A(H3N2) viruses predominated overall during the 2017-2018 season. However, influenza B viruses became more commonly reported than influenza A viruses in early March 2018 through May 2018.

How much flu vaccine was produced and distributed during the 2017-2018 season?
Flu vaccine is produced by private manufacturers, so supply depends on manufacturers. For the 2017-2018 season, manufacturers originally projected they would provide between 151 million and 166 million doses of injectable vaccine for the U.S. market. As of February 23, 2018, manufacturers reported having shipped approximately 155.3 million doses of flu vaccine; a record number of flu vaccine doses distributed. More information about flu vaccine supply is available at Seasonal Influenza Vaccine Supply & Distribution.

How effective was the 2017-2018 flu vaccine?
The overall vaccine effectiveness (VE) of the 2017-2018 flu vaccine against both influenza A and B viruses is estimated to be 40%. This means the flu vaccine reduced a person’s overall risk of having to seek medical care at a doctor’s office for flu illness by 40%. Protection by virus type and subtype was: 25% against A(H3N2), 65% against A(H1N1) and 49% against influenza B viruses. These VE estimates were presented to the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on June 20, 2018.

While flu vaccine can vary in how well it works, flu vaccination is the best way to prevent flu and its potentially serious complications and prevents millions of flu illnesses and related doctors’ visits and tens of thousands of hospitalizations. For example, during the 2016–2017 influenza season, CDC estimates that flu vaccine prevented an estimated 5.3 million illnesses, 2.6 million medical visits, and 85,000 hospitalizations associated with influenza. Similar estimates for 2017-2018 will be released in fall 2018. Influenza vaccination also has been shown to reduce the risk of flu death in children.

For more information about previous vaccine effectiveness, visit How Well Does the Seasonal Flu Vaccine Work?.

Was this season’s flu vaccine a good match for circulating viruses?
Yes. The majority of the influenza viruses collected from the United States during the 2017-2018 flu season were characterized antigenically and genetically as being similar to the cell-grown reference viruses representing the 2017–18 Northern Hemisphere influenza vaccine viruses.

How many antiviral resistant viruses were detected during the 2017-2018 season?
Antiviral resistance means that a virus has changed in such a way that antiviral drugs are less effective or not effective at all in treating or preventing illnesses with that virus. Since October 1, 2017, CDC tested 1,147 influenza A(H1N1)pdm09, 2,354 influenza A(H3N2), and 1,118 influenza B viruses for resistance to antiviral medications (i.e., oseltamivir, zanamivir, or peramivir). While the majority of the tested viruses showed susceptibility to the antiviral drugs, 11 (1.0%) H1N1pdm09 viruses were resistant to both oseltamivir and peramivir, but were sensitive to zanamivir. These results indicate that these antiviral drugs continue to be recommended treatment options for illness caused by currently circulating influenza viruses.

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"This system tracks the proportion of death certificates processed that list
pneumonia or influenza
as the underlying or contributing cause of death.
This system provides an overall indication of whether
flu-associated
deaths are elevated, but
does not provide an exact number of how many people died from flu."

BUT.........WE DO KNOW....that out of the "pneumonia or influenza" GROUP,
95 -98 per cent

die from pneumonia

not the flu

 

Check out why pneumonia is the listed Death reason.
When a person with the flu gets pneumonia, the pneumonia is considered a secondary bacterial infection, Adalja said. (Pneumonia can be caused by either a virus or bacteria; in the case of a secondary infection after flu, it is caused by bacteria.) Death from such secondary infections usually occurs about a week or so after the person first got sick, because it takes time for the secondary infection to set in, Adalja said.

The flu can lead to death in other ways as well. People with the flu can experience "multiple organ failure" throughout their body (in order words, multiple organs stop working properly), which can be deadly, Adalja said.

The flu can also trigger other serious complications, including inflammation of the heart, brain or muscle tissues, according to the CDC. Infection can also lead to an extreme, body-wide inflammatory response known as sepsis, which can be life-threatening, the CDC says.

The 2017–2018 flu season has been particularly harsh, partially because the predominant strain of flu that's spreading, H3N2, tends to cause more severe symptoms than other strains, Live Science reported this month. And although the flu strains circulating this year do match up with those covered in the season's flu vaccine, an odd phenomenon may have occurred during the vaccine-making process inside chicken eggs. During that process, flu strains can acquire genetic changes, and this may have happened for the H3N2 component of the vaccine, Adalja said previously.


I figure you just want to beat this to death for some private reason so lead on the horse is laying beside the dead rider.

 

Pneumonia and Influenza

Resident deaths over the eleven-year period for which the underlying cause of death was given on the death certificate as pneumonia or influenza. This includes viral and bacterial pneumonia, bronchopneumonia, and influenza with or without pneumonia or other respiratory manifestations.

Pneumonia and influenza are grouped together because of the difficulty of separating them. For example, some cases of influenza lead to pneumonia and are attributed to the pneumonia when the underlying cause is really influenza.

Caution: These counts and rates are not comparable to those prior to 1999. The transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10 effective January 1, 1999 involved changes in the rules for selecting the single underlying cause of death for persons who died of multiple causes.

The pneumonia and influenza category is one of the causes most seriously affected by the change.

Nationally, the number of deaths attributed to this cause under the new system was estimated to be about 70 percent of the number which would have been attributed to it prior to the change in classification.

International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) codes J09-J18.9.

 

I AM SO SORRY,
HK_User
i did not read about your dead horse until after my last entry

 

Sounds a lot like the flu shot is safer than getting the flu.
A lot of the people who die of flu before modern medicine died of pneumonia or dehydration.
Hell you could die just from being exposed to a hospital.
Go there with flu, leave with something just as bad if not worse.
Which all could have been avoided if you had gotten the flu shot.

 

Lucky for me I had studied a fair amount of disease propagation in the 70s as I bowed out of my EMT Job to preserve my family from AIDs as a secondary cause of death to me of attending others bloody gun shot wounds.

About the same time at my Shipyard Job I left early feeling poorly. Time was 11pm and I decided to stop by a real ER and get checked out. Not something I had ever done before.

Bottom line I had double pneumonia and spent a week in the Hosp after a Doc had sat with me through the night fearing I might die since I went into a Coma and could not communicate.

No Flu but I was released to go back on Light Duty. Surprising to me the Yard Book Keeper meet me at the Gate at the time clocks and said, " We don't have light duty here, but they need someone to watch the electric shop for the next couple of weeks, stay inside and stay dry."

I did and slowly improved over the next couple of months.

 

"Lucky for me I had studied a fair amount of disease propagation in the 70s as I bowed out of my EMT Job to preserve my family from AIDs as a secondary cause of death to me of attending others bloody gun shot wounds."

I bailed in '87 for the same reason.

After AIDS became widespread, it's just not worth it. So bad here that people quit even trying CPR on vaporlocked cases. The local FD and TeeVee run the hands-only CPR ads all the time.

Next issue set - is men refusing to perform CPR on females for fear of being sued/arrested.....

What a strange world this has become.

 

All the talk about vaccines, while flu fills the hospitals, in 2017 over 72,000 OD on drugs and died, other users that survived filled our prisons, fueled our crimes, etc. Don't think that vaccines per se help, but challenging the immune system may prime it for a new strain. Like treatments for high cholesterol, vaccines for herpes, shingles, flu, etc, Never let a little thing like actually preventing anything get in the way of making a killing on some new drug. YMMV

Agree with DKR, wife observed an accident in which positional asphyxiation occurred before the EMP's arrived and permanent brain damage happened. While this happened almost 20 years ago, it is less than 5 years ago that the last lawyer trying to sue someone questioned her as a listed witness. She had advanced Red Cross first aid and shortly after the accident some lawyer looked into seeing if she could be sued for not clearing his airway and it was dropped as she could not reach him to do so. Don't know if we would of got sued if she had touched him and tried to help. Between blood diseases, air borne diseases, and other infections, and lawyers, have to at least take care before you help an accident victim now.

 

Remember no good deed goes unpunished.
That's what things have come to.

 

The 80's and 90's were terrible for lottery suits. It didn't take torte reform to fix the issue. All it took was the judges ruling that whichever side loses a medical malpractice case pays all court costs

 

All this would be moot if frivolous lawsuits were disallowed.

 

If you really want to predict this winter's flu virulence, the data that you really need is last winter/spring virulence in China. the flu migrates around the world. Our's this year will be theirs next year and theirs last year will be ours this year plus random mutations all along the way. I don't know that there is an accurate way to look up information for China