An increasingly lax approach to COVID-19 control measures like masking, social distancing and hand-washing has allowed the flu to resume its annual pattern of spread around the country, health officials said.
Influenza-like illness — defined as a fever of over 100 degrees with a cough or sore throat — currently accounts for 2.8% of hospital visits, for the third week in January, down from a high 4.8% in the last week of December. However, it’s still above the national baseline of 2.5% for the season.
“It could go down and stay down, or you could have another increase with influenza B,” Schaffner said. Those rates are raising the pressure on hospitals in New Mexico, where the highly transmissible omicron variant has driven COVID-19 cases to over 480,000 overall, with a quarter of them in January alone.
“Typically our worst flu months for our system kind of historically have always been in January and February,” said Sandoval. “I do expect that we probably will still see more cases.” “There’s been so much misinformation about vaccines that some people aren’t comfortable,” said Wyche Etheridge, who sees flu patients as a physician at Meharry Medical College in Tennessee.