Flu Arrives Early, Off To Worrisome Start: The Situation In Georgia

GEORGIA — Seasonal influenza cases are higher than they’ve been at this time of the year in more than a decade, federal health officials said Friday, underscoring fears that hospitals in Georgia will be overwhelmed by a “tripledemic” of flu, the respiratory illness known as RSV and COVID-19.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned the flu season, which runs between October and May and normally peaks in December and January, has arrived unusually early and hard. Among 880,000 lab-confirmed cases so far this season, 6,900 people have been hospitalized and 360 people, including one child, have died.

Flu activity is the highest in the South and Southeast, and is picking up along the Atlantic coast.

Flu activity in most southern states is high, according to the CDC’s 2022-23 weekly map of influenza cases.

In Georgia, two people have had influenza-related deaths while 351 people have been hospitalized in the metro area as of Oct. 22, according to Georgia public health officials. There have been 23 influenza outbreaks.

Flu practically vanished over the past couple of years as people wore face masks and stayed out of crowded places to avoid COVID-19, which has killed more than 1 million people since early 2020. In the past week, 265,893 people in the United States have tested positive and 19,454 were hospitalized with COVID-19.

In Georgia, there have been 2,249,087 confirmed cases of COVID-19 cases in Georgia as of Oct. 26, data shows. There have been 33,740 deaths.

More than 128,000 people have been hospitalized with the virus. More than 17,000 have been admitted into the intensive care unit, according to data.

The CDC report comes as children’s hospitals across the country are seeing a rise in RSV cases. Cases of respiratory syncytial virus, as the common childhood illness is officially known, also plummeted during the first two years of the pandemic, but doctors now report an alarming increase in what is normally a fall and winter virus.

In Georgia, there were 186.333 antigen detections and 183.33 PCR detections as of Oct. 22, according to the CDC.

“The data are ominous,” William Schaffner, medical director for the nonprofit National Foundation for Infectious Diseases and a professor of infectious diseases at that Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, told The Washington Post.

“Not only is flu early, it also looks very severe,” he said. “This is not just a preview of coming attractions. We’re already starting to see this movie. I would call it a scary movie.”

A couple of things are compounding the problem. Flu, COVID-19 and RSV all have similar symptoms, making laboratory tests the only way to erase doubt about which disease should be treated. Also, less than a quarter of Americans have gotten flu shots, according to CDC data.

“That makes me doubly worried,” Schaffner told The Post. The high burden of flu “certainly looks like the start of what could be the worst flu season in 13 years.”

He and other medical officials worry influenza numbers could rival the H1N1 swine flu pandemic of 2009, when 60.8 million people were sickened, including nearly 12,500 who died.