An intense flu season is filling hospitals with severely ill patients – CNN
Source: CNN
The US is in the throes of an unusually intense and severe flu season, with hospitalization rates topping the levels seen with Covid-19 at some points of the pandemic.
On top of the flu infection itself, doctors say they’re seeing large numbers of patients with some of its most devastating complications.
In children, specialists say they’re seeing more than usual come to the hospital with neurologic complications, including devastating brain swelling that leads to tissue death — a condition called acute necrotizing encephalopathy, or ANE.
In adults, there are unexpected levels of pneumonia caused by flesh-eating superbug bacteria.
“We’re seeing a lot of MRSA pneumonia and really bad MRSA pneumonia after influenza, so what we call necrotizing, where you’re getting a lot of destruction of the lung tissue,” said Dr. John Lynch, an infectious disease specialist at UW Medicine.
MRSA is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a type of bacteria that shrugs off a lot of the antibiotics available to treat it. The infection can be deadly, but a person who survives this kind of pneumonia may also have scarred lungs, diminishing the ability to breathe normally during everyday activities.
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Bacterial pneumonia infections commonly follow the flu, especially for older adults. Doctors think they’re seeing more of these cases this year simply because the season is so busy. Still, they say, it’s unsettling.
On social media, people who identified themselves as critical care nurses say their intensive care units are packed with sick flu patients who’ve progressed to pneumonia and respiratory failure.
“We’re getting so many people in their 40s just absolutely getting wrecked by the flu,” one person who described themself as a nurse from Maryland wrote on Reddit.
“Feels like the Delta Covid wave in some ways,” said another nurse who said she works in the Pacific Northwest. CNN could not independently verify the identities of the people who posted.
They’re not the only places getting hit hard.
During the week ending February 1, there were 14.4 flu hospitalizations for every 100,000 people in the US, slightly higher than the rate of Covid-19 hospitalizations during the height of the Delta wave in September 2021, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Flu hospitalization rates this season are still about half of what they were during the very peak of the Covid pandemic, in the Omicron wave in 2022 – but it’s the first season that there have been more cumulative hospitalizations for flu than for Covid.
There have been about 64 flu hospitalizations for every 100,000 people so far this season, according to CDC data through February 1, compared with about 44 Covid hospitalizations for every 100,000 people. Last season, there were about 2.4 times more hospitalizations for Covid than for flu.
Weekly deaths from flu have also surpassed those from Covid for the first time, CDC data shows. There were 1,302 deaths from flu in the last two weeks of January, compared with 1,066 deaths from Covid.
From coast to coast, flu activity is very high, according to the CDC, with about 1 in every 3 people who are given a flu test in a clinic or hospital getting a positive result.
At some clinics in Washington, as many as half of patients who are tested are positive, Lynch said.
“Fifty percent positivity is really high,” he said. “Really mind-blowing.”
This week, Dr. Keith Van Haren, a pediatric immuno-neurologist at Stanford Medicine, posted a request for information on ANE cases to a service run by the International Society for Infectious Diseases, wrote that he and others in parts of the US have noted what appeared to be a sharp increase in cases this year.
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Doctors are not required to report ANE cases to public health departments and there’s no official tally of the typical number that are reported year-to-year, so it’s hard to tease out trends.
In discussions with his colleagues, however, Van Haren and his Stanford colleague Dr. Andrew Silverman are hearing about an increase in severe flu cases in children. Members of his team say they’ve heard of about 35 to 40 ANE cases over the past two flu seasons at university hospitals, and Silverman said most of those have been this season.
“There’s something happening,” Van Haren told CNN. “This is really unusual, what we’re seeing.”
ANE is brain swelling that may occur as the result of a number of viral infect
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