by Brian C. Joondeph, MD at American Thinker
Seasonal influenza, also known as “the flu,” visits America every year, similar to tornados, thunderstorms, heat waves, and snowstorms. As tracked by the CDC, over the past decade symptomatic flu cases ranged from 9 to 45 million cases per year in the US. Hospitalizations varied from 140 to 810 thousand, and deaths from 12 to 61 thousand, depending on the particular year, strain of influenza, and effectiveness of the vaccine.
This year, “flu activity is unusually low at this time” according to CDC surveillance. Since late September 2020, they recorded only about 2000 cases, a minute fraction of the tens of millions of cases in past years.
Hospitalizations this flu season are minimal with only 224 confirmed influenza hospitalizations from September 2020 to mid-April 202, nowhere near the hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations in past seasons.
Deaths are harder to measure since the CDC conveniently changed how deaths are characterized this past year. Instead of pneumonia, influenza, and COVID being in separate categories, now it’s called PIC, lumping the three entities together.
For children, the CDC doesn’t use PIC as COVID hospitalization or death in children is exceedingly rare, unless the child is immunocompromised. In each of the past three years, pediatric deaths ranged from 144 to 198 per year. This current flu season has seen only one single child die from the flu.
So what happened to the flu? From millions of cases to a few thousand. It would like having a winter with no snow, which despite predictions of NY Times climate experts, hasn’t come close to happening.
Perhaps the flu cases are mysteriously lost, like Hillary Clinton’s emails, Hunter Biden’s laptop, or John Durham’s sealed indictments…
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