I haven’t seen much mention of this: After decreasing for 7 weeks, hospital visits for influenza-like illness in the US held steady for a week and have now started to increase again. The CDC chart:
On the other hand, Google flu trends only shows a slight increase, in line with last year, and lab-confirmed flu cases decreased slightly in this period. Nevertheless, it will be no surprise if influenza has two peaks this season (though I expected a longer respite between peaks). I’m guessing we’re going to see an increase in flu again over the next few weeks.
Edit: OK, well, maybe I’m jumping the gun. The rise looks like it may just be a blip, dropping down again in the subsequent week:
I think historical patterns go out the window on this one. Typically, seasonal influenza always starts west and moves eastward. It seems to be following that pattern except it is coming very early this year
In previous incarnations of swine flu, the first wave was reasonably ineffective, leading people to prematurely dismiss it, often stopping treatment as soon as they felt better. This enabled the virus to adapt into more resistant forms, with the result that successive waves were more deadly.
I would be surprised if there were only two peaks this season. During the 1957 pandemic, a busy autumn was followed by a lull and then infections surged again starting in January. The current cold snap will not help matters.
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It’s interesting to see how similar, or not, the season variation is. It would be interesting to see that graphed over layed with UV light intensity with the research lately correlating vitamin D deficiency to higher incidences of the flu.
Nice to have this information. But I do appreciate much if I find articles working for the solutions for this H1N1 problem, i think we do need it for now.
Anything related to human biology has a huge number of variable that are also difficult to quantify, much less control. So it would be nice to see more about how the actual analysis was done. Statistics, as anyone who has studied it before knows, can be “bent” (intentionally or unintentionally). Are “blips” significant? Not usually, but they can be when you don’t know all the inputs (like H1N1). Thank you for the info.