Posts
Flu Shock: Outbreak Already Ranks as One of the Worst in a Decade (Chart)
15
January, 2013
Cough,
sore throat, body aches, fever. If you've typed these words into
Google recently, you're not alone.
This
year's flu season is off to a fast
and furious start.
The chart above shows data from Google's influenza tracker, which
analyzes how often people are searching for flu-related terms on
Google to estimate how many people have fallen ill. Google's
model was developed with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention and can show changes in the trajectory of an epidemic
before they appear in data collected from doctors and hospitals.
Google's
data show this year's outbreak to be the worst in the last six years.
That includes the 2009 swine flu outbreak, which infected
about 61
million Americans but turned
out to be less deadly than initially feared. Globally, the U.S.
remains the hardest hit, though it's still early in the Northern
Hemisphere season for numbers to be peaking.
The
Google data aren't perfect, and the weekly CDC flu report suggests a
somewhat lesser outbreak. Three seasons in the last decade registered
at least as bad as the current level of outbreak, according to the
CDC data (left): the 2009 pandemic, and the moderately severe seasons
of 2007-2008 and 2003-2004. Another positive sign is that the death
toll this season, while above normal for this time of year, so
far isn’t
especially gruesome.
The
flu kills anywhere from 3,000
to 49,000 people in
the U.S. every year, and about 500,000 globally. The vaccine is
designed to anticipate the three most active strains for the upcoming
flu season, though scientists sometimes get stumped by the rapidly
mutating viruses. This year’s shot is a pretty good match, making a
person 62
percent less likely to
get sick. Even when the shot fails to prevent a bout of flu, it can
make it much less severe – a few days of moderate sickness compared
to being wiped out for up to two weeks.
On
average, flu costs U.S. employers $10.4
billion in
direct costs of hospitalization and outpatient visits. Unfortunately,
Americans aren’t very good about going in for checkups or for
getting the recommended shots. Just 37 percent had been vaccinated by
November, when the outbreak started to pick up. It takes two weeks
for the vaccine to take full effect.
Of course, it’s not too late to get vaccinated, and many Americans are doing just that -- 130 million and counting.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.