The novel coronavirus that’s sickening thousands globally — and at
least five people in the US — is inspiring countries to close their
borders and Americans to buy up surgical masks quicker than major
retailers can restock them.
There’s another virus that has
infected 15 million Americans across the country and killed more than
8,200 people this season alone. It’s not a new pandemic — it’s
influenza.
The 2019-2020 flu season is projected to be one of the
worst in a decade, according to the National Institute of Allergy and
Infectious Diseases. At least 140,000 people have been hospitalized with
complications from the flu, and that number is predicted to climb as
flu activity swirls.
The flu is a constant in Americans’ lives.
It’s that familiarity that makes it more dangerous to underestimate,
said Dr. Margot Savoy, chair of Family and Community Medicine at Temple
University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine.
“Lumping all the
viral illness we tend to catch in the winter sometimes makes us too
comfortable thinking everything is ‘just a bad cold,'” she said. “We
underestimate how deadly influenza really is.”
Even the low-end
estimate of deaths each year is startling, Savoy said: The Centers for
Disease Control predicts at least 12,000 people will die from the flu in
the US every year. In the 2017-2018 flu season, as many as 61,000
people died, and 45 million were sickened.
In the 2019-2020
season so far, 15 million people in the US have gotten the flu and 8,200
people have died from it, including at least 54 children. Flu activity
has been elevated for 11 weeks straight, the CDC reported, and will
likely continue for the next several weeks.
Savoy, who also
serves on the American Academy of Family Physician’s board of directors,
said the novelty of emerging infections can overshadow the flu. People
are less panicked about the flu because healthcare providers “appear to
have control” over the infection.
“We fear the unknown and we
crave information about new and emerging infections,” she said. “We
can’t quickly tell what is truly a threat and what isn’t, so we begin to
panic — often when we don’t need to.”
The flu can be fatal…
Dr.
Nathan Chomilo, an adjunct assistant professor of pediatrics at
University of Minnesota Medical School, said that the commonness of the
flu often underplays its severity, but people should take it seriously.
“Severe cases of the flu are not mild illnesses,” Chomilo said. “Getting the actual flu, you are miserable.”
The
flu becomes dangerous when secondary infections emerge, the result of
an already weakened immune system. Bacterial and viral infections
compound the flu’s symptoms. People with chronic illnesses are also at a
heightened risk for flu complications.
Those complications
include pneumonia, inflammation in the heart and brain and organ failure
— which, in some cases, can be fatal.
Chomilo, an internist and
pediatrician for Park Nicollet Health Services, said this flu season
has been one of the worst his Minnesota practice has seen since the H1N1
virus outbreak in 2009. Some of his patients, healthy adults in their
30s, have been sent to the Intensive Care Unit, relying on ventilators,
due to flu complications.
The virus is always changing…
Influenza
is tricky because the virus changes every year. Sometimes, the dominant
strain in a flu season will be more virulent than in previous years,
which can impact the number of people infected and the severity of their
symptoms.
Most of these changes in the virus are small and
insignificant, a process called antigenic drift. That year’s flu vaccine
is mostly effective in protecting patients in spite of these small
changes, said Melissa Nolan, an assistant professor at the University of
South Carolina’s School of Public Health.
Occasionally, the flu
undergoes a rare antigenic shift, which results when a completely new
strain of virus emerges that human bodies haven’t experienced before,
she said.
Savoy compares it to a block party: The body thinks it
knows who — or in this case, which virus — will show up, and
therefore, which virus it needs to keep out. But if a virus shows up in a
completely new getup, it becomes difficult for the body’s “bouncers” —
that’s the immune system — to know who to look for and keep out. The
stealthy virus can infiltrate easily when the body doesn’t recognize it.
This
flu season, there’s no sign of antigenic shift, the most extreme
change. But it’s happened before, most recently in 2009 with the H1N1
virus. It became a pandemic because people had no immunity against it,
the CDC reported.
Get your flu shot, experts say
To avoid complications from the flu, Savoy, Chomilo and Nolan have the same recommendation: Get vaccinated.
It’s
not easy to tell how flu vaccination rates impact the number of people
infected, but Savoy said it seems that the years she struggles to get
her patients vaccinated are the years when more patients end up
hospitalized with the flu, even if the total number of infections
doesn’t budge.
The CDC reported at least 173 million flu vaccine
doses have been administered this flu season so far — that’s about 4
million more doses than the manufacturers who make the vaccines
projected to provide this season.
Still, there are some who
decide skipping the vaccine is worth the risk. A 2017 study found that
people decline the flu vaccine because they don’t think it’s effective
or they’re worried it’s unsafe, even though CDC research shows the
vaccine effectively reduces the risk of flu in up to 60% of the
population.
Chomilo said some of his most frustrating cases of
the flu are in patients who can’t be vaccinated because of preexisting
conditions or their age (children under 6 months old can’t be
vaccinated).