The Troubling Trends Pointing to a Severe Flu and RSV Season

Flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) season has just begun in the northern hemisphere, and the consensus among experts is that the 2022-2023 season is shaping up to be more severe than in the past few (relatively mild) years. It might even be worse than seasons before COVID-19. Health data company IQVIA has been analyzing data from insurance claims filed by doctors’ offices, hospitals, and urgent care centers in the country for three decades, and focused on case trends over the previous year. The team found that diagnoses of flu are already tracking at record highs. Even before flu season began, back in spring 2022, cases of influenza began trending well above average for the past three years, reaching nearly 950,000 cases weekly by mid-October (compared to around 400,000 at the same time in 2019, just before the pandemic began). [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] These higher rates aren’t completely unexpected. Influenza cases dropped significantly during the pandemic’s first two years, when people had less contact with one another and generally followed mitigation measures for controlling COVID-19, such as wearing masks and social distancing. Those behaviors helped to suppress the spread of flu. But, says Murray Aitken, executive director of the IQVIA Institute, the current flu numbers are “trending above every year since 2012 by a significant amount.” Experts are also concerned about another troubling flu trend. Flu season in t...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 healthscienceclimate Source Type: news