update<\/a> published by the agency on Tuesday with data through December 20. At least eight children have died from flu so far this season.\n <\/p>\n\n Among the states with the highest levels of flu activity are Colorado, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York and South Carolina, according to the CDC.\n <\/p>\n
\n Trends are increasing across key surveillance metrics: laboratory testing, outpatient health care visits, hospitalizations and mortality are all higher than they were a week ago.\n <\/p>\n
\n One surveillance system shows that flu hospitalizations doubled over the past week; more than 19,000 people were admitted to the hospital with flu during the most recent week, up from about 9,900 hospital admissions the week before.\n <\/p>\n
\n The CDC says that \u201cseverity indicators remain low at this time, but influenza activity is expected to continue for several weeks.\u201d\n <\/p>\n
\n Influenza A(H3N2) viruses are the most commonly reported, and additional genetic testing suggests that a new flu variant \u2014 called subclade K \u2014 that caused early and busy flu seasons in other part of the world appears to be driving the vast majority of cases in the US.\n <\/p>\n
\n The CDC recommends that everyone age 6 months and older get a flu vaccine each season, but vaccination rates have been decreasing in recent years. Only about 130 million flu vaccines have been distributed this season, CDC data shows, 13 million fewer doses than by this time last year. Additional data suggests that only about 17% of children and 23% of adults had gotten their seasonal flu vaccine by the end of November.\n <\/p>\n
\n Osterholm encourages people who haven\u2019t yet been vaccinated against flu to act quickly as the virus is \u201cwiping through\u201d the country.\n <\/p>\n
\n \u201cIt\u2019s not too late to get your flu shot,\u201d he said. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t guarantee you won\u2019t get flu. It doesn\u2019t guarantee that you still won\u2019t get sick, but it surely is a big improvement on what the otherwise outcome could be of either being seriously ill or dying.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Most US states are experiencing high or very high flu activity, and levels continue to increase nationwide. \u201cFlu…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":211846,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[163,85,46,482],"class_list":["post-211845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-medication","tag-health","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-medication"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211845\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/211846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}