Public health officials in Calif. reported approximately 147 deaths of young and middle-aged individuals caused by a severe flu, an exponential increase of at least 10 times the number of influenza fatalities last year.
A strain of the flu virus has caused crowding at doctors' offices at a rate of 50 percent higher than the norm. "It tells us we're still in the middle of flue seasons, and in the Northeast and California it's going up, up, up," said Lyn Finelli, head of the influenza surveillance and outbreak response team at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), to Reuters.
The culprit is the H1N1 strain and is observed to affect mostly people with ages 25 to 64, in part due to the immunity that older individuals have acquired from outbreaks that occurred decades ago. Over 52 lives have been claimed by the flu by the end of January.
Dr. James Watt, chief of the Division of Communicable Disease Control, said that another 44 cases suspected to be caused by flu are still under investigation in addition to the 147 confirmed deaths by the virus. Most were suffering other health conditions but not all of them.
Nancy Pinella, 47, an advertising executive who fell ill with H1N1 unfortunately passed away due to the disease. It quickly transformed to a call to get vaccinated against influenza that even Anne Gust Brown, Calif. first lady, posted on Twitter: "After reading the heartbreaking story of Nancy Pinella, went to CVS and got my first flu shot ever."
CDC spokesman Jason McDonald said that it is not yet clear if Calif. is an outlier in the severity of its cases because states are not required to report flu deaths to their agency and the information is gathered in different ways that vary from state to state and county to county.
