After skyrocketing in mid-December and causing a torrent of fever, chills and coughs, influenza appears to be retreating somewhat in New York City.
“There is some good news: Over the last two weeks, cases have declined,” Dr. Michelle Morse, the acting health commissioner for New York City, said Thursday at a news conference.
But she cautioned that it was far too soon to say that the worst of the flu season is definitely behind New Yorkers.
“We are not out of the woods yet,” she said, explaining that the flu was still “circulating at very high levels in New York City.”
The flu arrived earlier in New York than usual and ripped through the city at an alarming rate, as it has elsewhere in the nation. The dominant strain of the virus circulating this year, H3N2, has acquired mutations that could help it evade the body’s disease-fighting system.
By mid-December, far more New Yorkers were falling sick than at the height of a typical flu season. In the week ending Dec. 20, more patients went to emergency rooms in New York City complaining of flulike symptoms than during any flu season in the past decade.
Emergency room data suggests that the peak in New York City appears to have been around Dec. 16, when 1,693 patients with influenza-like symptoms were counted in the city’s emergency rooms. Those numbers have declined steeply, to well below 1,000 such patients a day recently.
But Dr. Morse said that it was not safe to assume that cases would keep declining.
“We are too early in the season to say whether or not we have passed our peak,” she said. Flu seasons are unpredictable, she said.
As of Jan. 3, more than 128,000 city residents had tested positive for the flu this season, about 1.5 percent of the city’s population. But that is sure to be a vast undercount of the actual number of people infected because many people don’t seek out medical attention when they have the flu and aren’t tested.
Across the state, 239,857 flu cases have been confirmed this season, resulting in 13,605 hospitalizations. Nationally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that between 3 and 11 percent of people nationwide get sick with the flu in a given season.
Flu season can last through April, even May, in New York. It remains to be seen whether this year’s flu season ends earlier, given the huge surge in infections early on.
The state’s health commissioner, Dr. James McDonald, said that New York had recently recorded the highest number of flu cases in a single week — 71,123 during the week ending Dec. 20 — since 2004, when the state began its current method of reporting cases.
Though this year’s flu variant has proved capable of evading immunity, the flu shot still provides protection. Some early data from Europe offers reassurance that people vaccinated against the flu are less likely to be hospitalized if infected.
City health officials said they did not have data regarding flu shot coverage among adults. But the percentage of children being vaccinated has declined compared with other years. This season, 30.6 percent of New Yorkers who are 18 months to 18 years old have received the flu shot, Dr. Ellen H. Lee, the director of the Respiratory Pathogen Unit at the city’s Health Department, said. The number of doses administered to children was almost 6 percent lower than at this point during the previous flu season, Dr. Lee said.
The drop comes amid rising mistrust of vaccines. Recently, federal health authorities have upended the childhood vaccine schedule, recommending that many children get fewer vaccines.
Joseph Goldstein covers health care in New York for The Times, following years of criminal justice and police reporting.
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