Boulder's Flu Season is ramping up
Flu season is starting to ramp up slightly along the Front Range, as Boulder County’s periodic Flu View report shows a jump in the number of people in emergency rooms presenting symptoms.
At the end of December 2019, just over 4% of emergency department visits were for illnesses that fit the Center for Disease Control’s definition for an influenza-like sickness. This number represents around a 2% jump from the previous period, and more than 2% above the baseline number the agency measures against.
John Marinelli with Longmont Times reports that Dr. Jamie Teumer, an emergency physician and medical director for UCHealth Longs Peak Hospital and UCHealth Medical Center of the Rockies in Loveland, said that he’s seen a “slow uptick” in flu symptoms. “With everybody traveling and doing everything else, coming from other parts of the country, we bring more and more exposure into the area from areas where (the number of flu cases) is even higher,” he said.
As of Dec. 22nd there were 7 hospitalizations for the whole season in the county, as well, three being of people over the age of 65 and none for children under the age of 4. Kaylan Stinson, the Boulder County Public Health Department’s regional epidemiologist, said that this kind of uptick in emergency department visits is par for the course when it comes to flu season. Boulder County’s numbers, too, she said, fairly closely mirror what’s going on in the rest of the northern Colorado region.
By the end of December, according to Boulder County’s Flu View report, more than 3.5% of emergency room visits in northern Colorado saw flu like symptoms. Stinson said, though, that data on hospitalizations due to influenza have shown that it isn’t so easy to predict.
“If you look at (the data), historically, what you see is that the flu is unpredictable,” she said. “We always know that starting somewhere at the end of September and into May, that we could have increased flu activity.”"
Source: https://www.ktvb.com/article/news/health/two-children-idaho-flu-deaths/277-3b410c87-2cb8-4374-9db8-5639f7580826
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