Many doctors are breathing a sigh of relief as the flu season passes its peak – but there is a warning of a sting in its tail.<\/p>\n
Hospitalisations from flu-like illnesses have dropped sharply in latest figures – to about 10 in 100,000.<\/p>\n
Children under-five have fallen for the first time since 2 August.<\/p>\n
College of General Practitioners clinicical lead Luke Bradford said GPs had also noticed a big drop-off in the community.<\/p>\n
After a mountain of cases this year, there was now a level of herd immunity from both vaccinations and people who had the virus, he said.<\/p>\n
“That’s why the peak drops off each year – it gets to the point where the virus can’t pass on to the next person at the same rate, because they are immune to it.”<\/p>\n
Auckland GP and Immunisation Advisory Centre senior M\u0101ori medical advisor Mamaeroa David said it was great to see the drop, as warmer weather hit, but another spike may yet come.<\/p>\n
A resurgence or a long tail of winter illnesses was not unusual, she said.<\/p>\n
“Often every year, we relax, but I feel like we’ve got another cold spell to come and that’s when we get another round of sickness come through,” she said<\/p>\n
Influenza A had driven the big surge in winter illnesses this year, with the super infectious K strain, and influenza B could still take off.<\/p>\n
Even though hospitalisations had dropped in the latest figures, they were still very similar to the peak of last year’s outbreak, another illustration of how big this season was.<\/p>\n
Both doctors said anyone who had not been vaccinated for flu should still take the chance to get one.<\/p>\n
The vaccine was now free for under-fives, for 65 and over, and for many others vulnerable to serious infections.<\/p>\n
Bradford hoped people would remember how bad this season had been, when it came time for vaccinations next year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Many doctors are breathing a sigh of relief as the flu season passes its peak – but there…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":604753,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[134,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-604752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-health","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=604752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604752\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/604753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=604752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=604752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=604752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}