Potentially severe flu season looms for Oregon
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Oregon may be facing a harsher flu season this year, as a more severe virus is beginning to spread earlier and faster nationwide, though it remains to be seen how sickly things will get.
Why it matters: The flu can cause a whole slew of nasty symptoms — like sore throat, runny nose, fever, cough and more — that can lead to hospitalization and even death in some cases.
The big picture: The new flu strain, a version of H3N2, emerged over the summer, and is already spreading rapidly across the world. Health officials in Canada, Japan and the U.K. have already warned of an H3N2 wave that's sending people to the hospital, Axios' Herb Scribner writes.
- While experts are worried that the new version of H3N2 doesn't match the strain used to create this year's flu vaccine, such mismatches are common with seasonal flu strains.
- Flu infections are also still low across most of the U.S., but are rising in more than three dozen states, per Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wastewater monitoring data as of Dec. 4.
What they're saying: "The CDC is warning that this flu season could be as bad as last year's flu season, which was the worst on record on hospitalizations and severe disease," Shereef Elnahal, president of Oregon Health & Science University, said at a press conference last month.
Zoom in: It is too early in the season to know if the flu will be more severe or dominated by the H3N2 strain, Howard Chiou, a medical director at Oregon Health Authority, told Axios.
- Current hospitalization and positivity rates are in line with what is normally expected at this point in the season, he said, but those rates are creeping up.
- Flu is a virus that mutates super fast and is unpredictable, Chiou added, and urged Oregonians to not wait to hear news about severity of a season before getting vaccinated.
- "You don't wait for an accident to put the seat belt on," he said.
By the numbers: Around 1 million people, or roughly 23% of Oregonians, have received the flu vaccine so far this season, according to OHA.
- Those numbers are expected to continue to rise over the next few months, Chiou said, but are around 5% lower than last year so far.
- Flu vaccine uptake has fallen in recent years in part due to a broader wave of growing vaccine skepticism.