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Fortune
Fortune
Lindsey Leake

Experts warn flu season hasn’t peaked yet, and will get worse before it gets better

A man blows his nose (Credit: Charday Penn—Getty Images)

If you haven’t caught the flu this season, perhaps you know someone who has, or are concerned about the virus infiltrating your household. We are, by at least one measure, in the midst of the nation’s worst flu season in recent decades.

At least 24 million illnesses, 310,000 hospitalizations, and 13,000 influenza-linked deaths—including 57 children—have plagued the U.S. this season, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Flu-related emergency department visits necessitated the CDC’s most severe “very high” ranking as of Feb. 7, as did influenza virus activity in national wastewater samples. What’s more, the percentage of outpatient and emergency department visits concerning patients with influenza-like illness (ILI) hit a season high of 7.8% the week ended Feb. 1, greater than any other week since at least the 1997–98 flu season.

Alarming though these numbers may seem, Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, doesn’t see a need for panic.

“We are in the midst of respiratory virus season, and influenza activity typically peaks in February,” Adalja tells Fortune. “There has been a respite in influenza during the early COVID years and now the virus is back in its usual pattern.”

From the 1982–83 through 2023–24 seasons, flu activity peaked in February 17 times, CDC records show. That’s nearly double the nine times of runner-up December. Recently, as Adalja pointed out, COVID altered traditional patterns of flu spread. In 2020–21, the first full flu season of the pandemic, flu activity was so unusually low that the CDC couldn’t discern a peak. But there’s a downside to the coronavirus effect, according to Dr. Mark Mulligan, director of infectious diseases and immunology at NYU Langone Health.

View this interactive chart on Fortune.com

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