Hospitals see one of the worst flu seasons in years

Hospitals have faced a difficult flu season, with high flu activity across most of the country.

Pediatric hospitalizations have hit the highest levels in 15 years, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention said Friday. The hospitalization rate for all flu patients reached the second highest peak since the 2010-11 season, the CDC says.

While some areas have seen improvements since big spikes around the holidays, hospitals are treating a high number of flu patients, and they stress that the season isn’t over.

Scott Roberts, MD, associate medical director of infection prevention at Yale New Haven Health, tells Chief Healthcare Executive® that the flu season has been “a rough one, and we're not out of it yet.”

“We’ve had some of our highest flu numbers that we've seen in years, certainly since pre-covid,” Roberts said Wednesday.

Roberts said the situation at Yale New Haven is better than when cases surged during and just after the holidays, but he noted that the flu season can stretch into the early spring.

Nicole Stallings, president and CEO of the Hospital and Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania, told Chief Healthcare Executive® Friday that the state’s hospitals were seeing high volumes of patients with the flu.

“Emergency rooms are full,” she said. “We know that we're looking at alternative sites and to make sure that we can meet that capacity that's happening. So we have some hospitals that are delaying elective procedures to ensure that they are able to take care of all the patients that are coming in with flu and with RSV. It is a particularly challenging time.”

Pennsylvania has seen a significant drop in flu cases over the past week, with cases dropping nearly in half.

Still, the American Red Cross says high flu activity nationwide may have deterred some potential blood donors.

The nation’s blood supply has dropped 35% over the past month, and the Red Cross says the flu outbreak has “overburdened hospitals.” Some hospitals are triaging critical blood products.

‘Tough winter for kids’

Yale New Haven Health has seen a lot of children with the flu, with the highest numbers among infants to four-year-olds, followed by those between the ages of four and eight.

“It's been a really tough winter for kids,” Roberts said.

Overall, the CDC estimates that there have been 230,000 hospitalizations and 9,300 deaths from the flu this season. So far, 32 influenza-associated pediatric deaths have been reported this season, according to the CDC.

Dr. Steven Valassis, an emergency medicine doctor at Hartford HealthCare’s St. Vincent's Medical Center, told Chief Healthcare Executive® Tuesday that there was “a huge flu surge following the holidays.”

“When those surges happen, that's when you see the real strain on hospitals and taking care of people,” Valassis said. “Because again, once hospitals fill up, there's more pressure in the emergency department to take care of patients.”

Valassis says the number of patients with the flu have dropped, but he says flu cases could persist for a while. “I think it's going to be challenging over the next several weeks,” he said.

Matthew Cook, CEO of the Children’s Hospital Association, told Chief Healthcare Executive® in an interview earlier this month that it has been a “very significant flu season.”

“All of the members I've talked to have said they have pretty high volumes related to flu,” Cook said, adding, “What we're seeing is a lot of kids visiting the ED and potentially being admitted.”

In Boston, city officials reported two deaths associated with the flu in children under the age of 2 earlier this month. They were the first pediatric deaths tied to the flu in Boston since 2013. New York reported the highest number of flu cases in a single week in more than two decades, state officials said.

Powerful strain

Hospitals and physicians have been seeing patients affected by a potent strain of influenza A (H3N2) virus dubbed subclade K, and it’s been “particularly nasty,” Roberts said.

The United Kingdom and Japan grappled with early, fast-spreading waves of the flu in the fall, and Roberts said a lot of people were predicting a bad flu season.

The new strain combined with more people being indoors in closed spaces, and many people seeing friends and families at gatherings.

“It's sort of like a perfect setting to have the flu spread like wildfire,” Roberts said.

The strain’s mutations made it “a little bit more distant from what we thought was when the vaccine was made,” he said.

Fewer vaccinations

Doctors say they’re seeing more patients who haven’t been vaccinated. Even with this year’s strain differing from what was anticipated, the vaccine still is typically helping patients avoid more serious symptoms.

“Most of the people who get admitted with severe flu, hospitalized, on oxygen, ICU, are unvaccinated,” Roberts said.

The Department of Health & Human Services this month dropped its universal recommendations for all kids to get the flu shot. It’s part of a broader revision to the federal guidance on recommended childhood vaccines, and the American Academy of Pediatrics and other medical societies have blasted those changes under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The American Academy of Pediatrics continues to recommend the flu shot and is standing by its own guidance on childhood vaccines.

Medical groups have criticized the changing recommendations on the flu vaccines, which now call for families to talk with doctors and make their own choices. Healthcare leaders were especially critical of the timing of the announcement to drop the recommendation of flu vaccines, even as the federal government’s own data shows it’s a difficult flu season.

Roberts says the guidance only creates more confusion at a time when more should be getting vaccinated for the flu for greater protection.

“You're adding barriers to vaccines,” he says. “It's only going to drive down vaccination.”