FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WFFT) - The Allen County Department of Health (ACDH) released an update today on the state of COVID-19 in Allen County.
They reported eight deaths and 882 positive cases from February 3 to today, bringing totals to 134,716 cases and 1,316 deaths as of today.
Other updates relating to COVID-19 can be found on the ACDH's COVID-19 website, which is time-stamped to provide the latest local data to the public.
By BIANCA VZQUEZ TONESS and MORIAH BALINGIT (AP Education Writers)
Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and upended child care, the CDC says parents can start treating the virus like other respiratory illnesses.
Gone are mandated isolation periods and masking. But will schools and child care centers agree?
In case youve lost track: Before Friday, all Americans, including school children, were supposed to stay home for at least five days if they had COVID-19 and then mask for a set period of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Now the CDC says children can go back to school when their overall symptoms improve and theyre fever-free for 24 hours without taking medication. Students are encouraged to wear a mask when they return.
Still, the change may not affect how individual schools urge parents to react when their children fall sick. Schools and child care providers have a mixed record on following CDC recommendations and often look to local authorities for the ultimate word. And sometimes other goals, such as reducing absences, can influence a state or districts decisions.
The result can be a confusing variation among states and districts, confounding parents whose lives have long been upended by the virus.
For example, during the 2021-2022 school year, only 18 states followed CDC recommendations for mask-wearing in class. When the CDC lifted its masking guidelines in February of 2022, states like Massachusetts followed suit, but California kept the mask requirement for schools.
And in the child care world, some providers have long used more stringent testing and isolation protocols than the CDC has recommended. Reasons have ranged from trying to prevent outbreaks to keeping staff healthy both for their personal safety and to keep the day care open.
Some states moved to more lenient guidelines ahead of the CDC. California and Oregon recently rescinded COVID-19 isolation requirements, and many districts followed their advice.
In an attempt to minimize school absences and address an epidemic of chronic absenteeism, California has encouraged kids to come to school when mildly sick and said that students who test positive for coronavirus but are asymptomatic can attend school. Los Angeles and San Diegos school systems, among others, have adopted that policy.
But the majority of districts around the country still have asked parents to isolate children for at least five days before returning to school. Some, including Boston and Atlanta, have required students to mask for another five days and report positive COVID-19 test results to the school.
A school or day cares specific guidelines are consequential for working parents who must miss work if their child cant go to school or child care. In October 2023, as the nations parents and caretakers wrestled with simultaneous surges of COVID, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza, 104,000 adults reported missing work because of child care issues, the highest number in at least a decade. That number has fallen: Last month, child care problems meant 41,000 adults missed work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Melissa Colagrossos child care center in West Virginia dropped special guidelines for COVID about a year ago, she said. Now, theyre the same as other illnesses: A child must be free of severe symptoms such as fever for at least 24 hours before returning to the center.
We certainly are treating COVID just like we would treat flu or hand, foot and mouth disease, said Colagrosso, CEO of A Place To Grow Childrens Center in Oak Hill.
As for kids without symptoms who test positive for COVID? Most parents have stopped testing kids unless they have symptoms, Colagrasso said, so its a quandary she has not encountered.
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The Hawaii Department of Health is in general agreement with todays updated COVID-19 guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
DOH continuously reviews data on respiratory pathogens, including the virus that causes COVID-19.
When people get sick with a respiratory virus, the updated guidance recommends that they stay home and away from others. For people with COVID-19 and influenza, treatment is available and can lessen symptoms and lower the risk of severe illness. The recommendations suggest returning to normal activities when, for at least 24 hours, symptoms are improving overall, and if a fever was present, it has been gone without use of a fever-reducing medication.
Once people resume normal activities, they are encouraged to take additional prevention strategies for the next 5 days to curb disease spread, such as taking more steps for cleaner air, enhancing hygiene practices, wearing a well-fitting mask, keeping a distance from others, and/or getting tested for respiratory viruses.
CDCs updated guidance reflects how the circumstances around COVID-19 in particular have changed. While it remains a threat, today it is far less likely to cause severe illness because of widespread immunity and improved tools to prevent and treat the disease. Importantly, states and countries that have already adjusted recommended isolation times have not seen increased hospitalizations or deaths related to COVID-19.
The trend in Hawaii is similar to that nationally, in which significant declines in COVID-19 hospitalizations and mortality have been associated with the high degree of population immunity, availability of vaccinations, and access to treatment. As the threat from COVID-19 more closely resembles other common respiratory viruses, CDC is issuing Respiratory Virus Guidance, rather than additional virus-specific guidance.
The new pan-respiratory guidance makes it easier for people to take actions to prevent disease spread, even if they are unable to identify the specific respiratory disease.
DOH will be reviewing CDCs guidance over the coming week as the department prepares updates to state-level guidance to align with these changes.
To read more about the CDCs changes, visit Protect yourself from COVID-19, Flu, and RSV.
COVID-19 may have been intentionally created in a Chinese lab, a Rutgers University professor told the United Nations this week, and another expert says the evidence has reached the level of a smoking gun.
The virus that created a pandemic and killed millions around the world may have been made in Chinas Wuhan Institute of Virology, Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers, was quoted saying in a Wall Street Journal article.
Mr. Ebright cited evidence found in a 2018 document from the lab that said it was working on exactly that. The document elevates the evidence provided by the genome sequence from the level of noteworthy to the level of a smoking gun, Mr. Ebright said in the article by former New York Times editor Nicholas Wade.
The disclosed documents describe a grant proposal known as Project DEFUSE, which outlined intentions to examine bat coronaviruses potentially transmissible to humans. The grant proposal was not approved by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and failed to secure funding.
Nonetheless, speculation persists about whether the research may have proceeded with support from the Chinese government. Project DEFUSE also suggested modifications to bat coronavirus spike proteins, introducing human-specific cleavage sites. Notably, these techniques are similar to those some biologists surmise could have played a role in crafting the coronavirus responsible for the global health crisis.
Viruses made according to the DEFUSE protocol could have been available by the time COVID-19 broke out, sometime between August and November 2019, Mr. Wade wrote. This would account for the otherwise unexplained timing of the pandemic along with its place of origin.
Mr. Wade asserted that the genetic structure of the coronavirus that eventually spread around the world indicates the virus laboratory birth.
Whereas most viruses require repeated tries to switch from an animal host to people, SARS-CoV-2 infected humans out of the box, as if it had been preadapted while growing in the humanized mice called for in the DEFUSE protocol, Mr. Wade wrote.
For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.
Staff can be reached at 202-636-3000.
Four years after what was once the novel coronavirus was declared a pandemic, COVID remains the most dangerous infectious respiratory illness regularly circulating in the U.S. But a glance at the United States most prominent COVID policies can give the impression that the disease is just another seasonal flu. COVID vaccines are now reformulated annually, and recommended in the autumn for everyone over the age of six months, just like flu shots; tests and treatments for the disease are steadily being commercialized, like our armamentarium against flu. And the CDC is reportedly considering more flu-esque isolation guidance for COVID: Stay home til youre feeling better and are, for at least a day, fever-free without meds.
These changes are a stark departure from the earliest days of the crisis, when public-health experts excoriated public figuresamong them, former President Donald Trumpfor evoking flu to minimize COVID deaths and dismiss mitigation strategies. COVID might still carry a bigger burden than flu, but COVID policies are getting more flu-ified.
Read: The flu-ification of COVID policy is almost complete
In some ways, as the populations immunity has increased, COVID has become more flu-like, says Roby Bhattacharyya, a microbiologist and an infectious-disease physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. Every winter seems to bring a COVID peak, but the virus is now much less likely to hospitalize or kill us, and somewhat less likely to cause long-term illness. People develop symptoms sooner after infection, and, especially if theyre vaccinated, are less likely to be as sick for as long. COVID patients are no longer overwhelming hospitals; those who do develop severe COVID tend to be those made more vulnerable by age or other health issues.
Even so, COVID and the flu are nowhere near the same. SARS-CoV-2 still spikes in non-winter seasons and simmers throughout the rest of the year. In 2023, COVID hospitalized more than 900,000 Americans and killed 75,000; the worst flu season of the past decade hospitalized 200,000 fewer people and resulted in 23,000 fewer deaths. A recent CDC survey reported that more than 5 percent of American adults are currently experiencing long COVID, which cannot be fully prevented by vaccination or treatment, and for which there is no cure. Plus, scientists simply understand much less about the coronavirus than flu viruses. Its patterns of spread, its evolution, and the durability of our immunity against it all may continue to change.
And yet, the CDC and White House continue to fold COVID in with other long-standing seasonal respiratory infections. When the nations authorities start to match the precautions taken against COVID with those for flu, RSV, or common colds, it implies that the risks are the same, Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at the University of Maryland, told me. Some of those decisions are not completely unreasonable, says Costi Sifri, the director of hospital epidemiology at UVA Health, especially on a case-by-case basis. But taken together, they show how bent America has been on treating COVID as a run-of-the-mill diseasemaking it impossible to manage the illness whose devastation has defined the 2020s.
Each not completely unreasonable decision has trade-offs. Piggybacking COVID vaccines onto flu shots, for instance, is convenient: Although COVID-vaccination rates still lag those of flu, they might be even lower if no one could predict when shots might show up. But such convenience may come at the cost of protecting Americans against COVIDs year-round threat. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, told me that a once-a-year vaccine policy is dead wrong There is no damn evidence this is a seasonal virus yet. Safeguards against infection and milder illness start to fade within months, leaving people who dose up in autumn potentially more susceptible to exposures by spring. That said, experts are still torn on the benefits of administering the same vaccine more than once a yearespecially to a public thats largely unwilling to get it. Throughout the pandemic, immunocompromised people have been able to get extra shots. And today, an advisory committee to the CDC voted to recommend that older adults once again get an additional dose of the most recently updated COVID vaccine in the coming months. Neither is a pattern that flu vaccines follow.
Read: Falls vaccine routine didnt have to be this hard
Dropping the current COVID-isolation guidelinewhich has, since the end of 2021, recommended that people cloister for five daysmay likewise be dangerous. Many Americans have long abandoned this isolation timeline, but given how new COVID is to both humanity and science, symptoms alone dont yet seem enough to determine when mingling is safe, Popescu said. (The dangers are even tougher to gauge for infected people who never develop fevers or other symptoms at all.) Researchers dont currently have a clear picture of how long people can transmit the virus once they get sick, Sifri told me. For most respiratory illnesses, fevers show up relatively early in infection, which is generally when people pose the most transmission risk, says Aubree Gordon, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. But although SARS-CoV-2 adheres to this same rough timeline, infected people can shed the virus after their symptoms begin to resolve and are definitely shedding longer than what you would usually see for flu, Gordon told me. (Asked about the specifics and precise timing of the update, a CDC spokesperson told me that there were no updates to COVID guidelines to announce at this time, and did not respond to questions about how flu precedents had influenced new recommendations.)
At the very least, Emily Landon, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Chicago, told me, recommendations for all respiratory illnesses should tell freshly de-isolated people to mask for several days when theyre around others indoors; she would support some change to isolation recommendations with this caveat. But if the CDC aligns the policy fully with its flu policy, it might not mention masking at all.
Read: No one really knows how much COVID is silently spreading again
Several experts told me symptom-based isolation might also remove remaining incentives to test for the coronavirus: Theres little point if the guidelines for all respiratory illnesses are essentially the same. To be fair, Americans have already been testing less frequentlyin some cases, to avoid COVID-specific requirements to stay away from work or school. And Osterholm and Gordon told me that, at this point in the pandemic, they agree that keeping people at home for five days isnt sustainableespecially without paid sick leave, and particularly not for health-care workers, who are in short supply during the height of respiratory-virus season.
But the less people test, the less theyll be diagnosedand the less theyll benefit from antivirals such as Paxlovid, which work best when administered early. Sifri worries that this pattern could yield another parallel to flu, for which many providers hesitate to prescribe Tamiflu, debating its effectiveness. Paxlovid use is already shaky; both antivirals may end up chronically underutilized.
Flu-ification also threatens to further stigmatize long COVID. Other respiratory infections, including flu, have been documented triggering long-term illness, but potentially at lower rates, and to different degrees than SARS-CoV-2 currently does. Folding this new virus in with the rest could make long COVID seem all the more negligible. Whats more, fewer tests and fewer COVID diagnoses could make it much harder to connect any chronic symptoms to this coronavirus, keeping patients out of long-COVID clinicsor reinforcing a false portrait of the conditions rarity.
The U.S. does continue to treat COVID differently from flu in a few ways. Certain COVID products remain more available; some precautions in health-care settings remain stricter. But these differences, too, will likely continue to fade, even as COVIDs burden persists. Tests, vaccines, and treatments are slowly commercializing; as demand for them drops, supply may too. And several experts told me that they wouldnt be surprised if hospitals, too, soon flu-ify their COVID policies even more, for instance by allowing recently infected employees to return to work once theyre fever-free.
Early in the pandemic, public-health experts hoped that COVIDs tragedies would prompt a rethinking of all respiratory illnesses. The pandemic showed what mitigations could do: During the first year of the crisis, isolation, masking, distancing, and shutdowns brought flu transmission to a near halt, and may have driven an entire lineage of the virus to extinctionsomething that never, in my wildest dreams, did I ever think would be possible, Landon told me.
Most of those measures werent sustainable. But Americas leaders blew right past a middle ground. The U.S. could have built and maintained systems in which everyone had free access to treatments, tests, and vaccines for a longer list of pathogens; it might have invested in widespread ventilation improvements, or enacted universal sick leave. American homes might have been stocked with tests for a multitude of infectious microbes, and masks to wear when people started to cough. Vaccine requirements in health-care settings and schools might have expanded. Instead, we seem to be in a more 2019-like place than a future where were preventing giving each other colds as much as we could, Bhattacharyya told me.
Read: Next winter, what if we test for even more viruses?
That means a return to a world in which tens of thousands of Americans die each year of flu and RSV, as they did in the 2010s. With COVID here to stay, every winter for the foreseeable future will layer on yet another respiratory virusand a particularly deadly, disabling, and transmissible one at that. The math is simple: The risk has overall increased for everyone, Landon said. That straightforward addition could have inspired us to expand our capacity for preserving health and life. Instead, our tolerance for suffering seems to be the only thing thats grown.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its COVID guidelines for 2024, removing the five-day isolation recommendation as the agency said it aims to mirror guidance for other respiratory infections. So what do you need to do if you test positive for COVID?
The change marks the first time the U.S. agency has loosened its COVID isolation recommendations in three years.
Our goal here is to continue to protect those at risk for severe illness while also reassuring folks that these recommendation are simple, clear, easy to understand, and can be followed, said Dr. Mandy Cohen, the CDCs director.
Here's a look at what you should know:
The changes mean people can return to work or regular activities if their symptoms are mild and improving and it's been a day since they've had a fever, but the CDC still recommends those with symptoms stay home.
"The recommendations suggest returning to normal activities when, for at least 24 hours, symptoms are improving overall, and if a fever was present, it has been gone without use of a fever-reducing medication," the guidance states.
Once activities are resumed, the CDC still recommends "additional prevention strategies" for an additional five days, including wearing a mask and keeping distance from others.
There is no change to guidelines for nursing homes and health care facilities, however.
The agency is emphasizing that people should still try to prevent infections in the first place, by getting vaccinated, washing their hands, and taking steps to bring in more outdoor fresh air.
As part of the guidance, CDC suggests:
The change comes at a time when COVID-19 is no longer the public health menace it once was. It dropped from being the nation's third leading cause of death early in the pandemic to 10th last year.
Most people have some degree of immunity to the coronavirus from past vaccinations or from infections. And many people are not following the five-day isolation guidance anyway, some experts say.
"While it remains a threat, today it is far less likely to cause severe illness because of widespread immunity and improved tools to prevent and treat the disease," the CDC stated. "Importantly, states and countries that have already adjusted recommended isolation times have not seen increased hospitalizations or deaths related to COVID-19."
COVID-19 is not causing as many hospitalizations and deaths as it did in the first years of the pandemic. The change is an effort to streamline recommendations so they are similar to longstanding recommendations for flu and other respiratory viruses. Many people with a runny nose, cough or other symptoms aren't testing to distinguish whether it's COVID-19, flu, or something else, officials say.
This may not be as stringent, but also emphasizes that all people with respiratory symptoms should stay home while they are sick, said Dr. David Margolius, the head of Cleveland's health department.
There's been no recent change in the science of how long people with COVID-19 are likely contagious, said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown Universitys School of Public Health.
What has changed is how much COVID is harming us as a population, Nuzzo said.
However, some experts worry that the change may increase the risk of infection for those people who are more vulnerable to developing severe illness.
Illinois' health department has not yet released a statement on the new guidelines, but when reports surfaced last month of potential changes in store, the department said it was still evaluating its guidelines.
State health officials said they were "aware of the CDCs consideration of new COVID-19 guidelines and are continuing to evaluate our own statewide guidelines."
"As we work with our federal partners to provide the most appropriate recommendations to our residents moving forward, IDPH continues to emphasize the importance of using all preventative tools to protect yourself and your loved ones from COVID-19," the Illinois Department of Public Health said at the time."Especially for those with certain underlying conditions, COVID-19 even today poses a more serious risk of severe health outcomes than RSV or flu. The lessons we learned during the pandemic continue to remain valuable for COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases. This means washing your hands frequently if you have a cough/cold/respiratory symptoms and even considering wearing a mask to prevent the transmission of those germs to others.You shouldalso get tested if you are experiencing symptoms, as it can help you access time sensitive treatments for Flu and Covid-19. And, lets not forget vaccinations.Vaccinations continues to remain the most effective tool to protect you from serious illness from these respiratory infections."
Some experts said the move isn't unexpected, but even some who understand the rationale for the change have concerns.
My biggest worry in all of this is that employers will take this change in guidance to require employees to come back to work ... before they are ready to, before they feel well enough, and before they are not likely to pose harm to their co-workers, Nuzzo said.
Others, however, said the guidelines are more "reasonable" for those who do contract a more mild illness.
"I think this is expected because they're trying to give guidelines that are going to be reasonable that people will follow," Dr. Jonathan Pinsky, the director of infection control at Edward Hospital, told NBC Chicago last month. "We already have guidelines for other viruses like influenza about how long people need to stay at home, so they wanted to kind of get in line with those guidelines and give people a reasonable instructions about how to behave."
"My reaction was, 'It's about time,' you know? We're going to have some changes in terms of these quarantines as we get year to year to year into our COVID pandemic because it is becoming, for many people, a more mild illness and it's time we sort of treat it and approach it like other respiratory viruses that we commonly see in the fall- influenza RSV - more typical durations of contagiousness and durations of isolation," said Dr. Mia Taormina, infectious disease chair at Duly Health & Care.
Taormina even added that it could make things safer in some cases.
"I'd rather have folks staying home for a day or two, going back to work or to their usual activities on day three or four if they're feeling better, as opposed to not testing at all because they don't want to be hung up on this mandatory five days away from work away from their activities," she said.
But many still stress that staying home if you're ill and masking will be more important than before.
"It's important to know that once you have COVID or another virus, you can still spread it especially in those first few days. And so it'll still be important to wear a mask to protect other people," Pinsky said. "If you're going leaving your home, especially if it's only after a day or two of infection, you're still going to be infectious. So it's important to wear the mask to protect other people for full 10 days."
"We're not saying that this is any less contagious, that we can go out and about - it's just for people that are having improvement in their symptoms. otherwise healthy hosts, they are less likely to be meaningfully contagious once those fevers are gone and their symptoms are getting better," Taormina said. "So with some mask wearing and picking and choosing your activities, we should be in a better place ... the messaging stays the same. If you're not feeling, well stay home."
Here are the protocols previously listed by the agency:
Regardless of vaccination status,you should isolate from others when you have COVID-19, the CDC reports.
You should also isolateif you are sick and suspect that you have COVID-19 but do not yet havetestresults.If your results are negative, you can end that isolation.
If you test positive for COVID-19, you shouldstay home for at least five days and isolate from others in your home. The CDC notes that people are "likely most infectious during these first five days."
When you have COVID-19, isolation is counted in days, as follows:
If you had no symptoms:
If you had symptoms:
Other guidance for those who test positive:
If you had no symptoms, you can end your isolation after day five, but for those who experience symptoms, that line might be different, the CDC notes.
Those who have mild symptoms can end isolation after day five if they are fever-free for 24 hours, without using fever-reducing medication, but those with more moderate or severe illnesses will need to wait until day 10.
Those who have mild symptoms that are not improving should also wait until those symptoms are improving and they are fever-free for 24 hours.
Those with more severe illness may also want to consult with their doctor before ending isolation and could need a viral test to end their isolation period.
Despite ending isolation, those who test positive should continue to avoid people and mask through at least day 11, according to the CDC guidelines.
NEW YORK (AP) Early estimates suggest flu shots are performing OK in the current U.S. winter flu season.
The vaccines were around 40% effective in preventing adults from getting sick enough from the flu that they had to go to a doctors office, clinic or hospital, health officials said during a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccines meeting Wednesday. Children who were vaccinated were roughly 60% less likely to get treatment at a doctors office or hospital, CDC officials said.
Officials generally are pleased if a flu vaccine is 40% to 60% effective.
The shots tend to do better when they are well matched against the circulating flu strains. Officials say thats whats happened during this relatively typical flu season.
Annual flu vaccines are recommended for everyone 6 months and older in the U.S. About half of eligible kids and just under half of adults got flu shots in the last several months, according to CDC data.
The CDC uses several systems to track the vaccines. One is a network of hospitals that offer information on how well the vaccines prevent flu-related illnesses bad enough to require admission. Another draws on outpatient data from urgent care clinics and hospital emergency departments.
Estimates from four different surveillance systems were presented at Wednesdays meeting of a committee that advises the CDC on vaccines. The findings were reported as ranges, but their midpoints hovered close to 40% for adults and around 60% for children.
The adult effectiveness estimate is similar to what CDC initially reported for last flu season. The shots proved less effective in some other recent seasons, the results influenced by what virus strain was dominating and how well the vaccines were matched to it.
One committee member expressed disappointment at recent effectiveness findings.
There seems to be diminishing returns for annual influenza immunization, said Dr. Sarah Long, of Drexel University.
Long asked whether repeated vaccinations, year-after-year, might be leading to lower immune system responses. A CDC official said some researchers have been exploring that question, so far without conclusive results.
One thing that does seem to arise consistently from these things is that in general you are better off if you got vaccinated than if you didnt, said the CDCs Dr. Lisa Grohskopf.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Flu vaccine appears to be offering reasonable levels of protection this winter, with particularly strong levels in children, new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest.
The vaccine effectiveness estimates, which showed unusually robust protection for children against influenza B viruses but more modest protection for people ages 65 and older against influenza A viruses, were presented Wednesday at a meeting of the CDCs expert vaccine panel, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
The figures were based on data from four national databases, and a separate analysis from California.
This flu season is ongoing and these estimates are preliminary. The CDC will reassess the vaccines effectiveness later in the year, after the season ends. That said, flu activity appeared to peak over the Christmas holidays, and has been declining slowly since then. The CDC has assessed this flu season as being of moderate severity.
In children, the vaccine effectiveness against any type of flu infection requiring medical care ranged from 59% to 67%, depending on the database. Protection against illness serious enough to require hospitalization ranged from 52% to 61%.
The vaccine effectiveness in children against influenza A H1N1 viruses the type that has predominated this flu season ranged from 54% to 61% against flu infection requiring medical care and between 64% and 89% in protecting against infection with influenza B. Flu B viruses have made up a minority of circulating viruses this year, though they have been seen more commonly in the past few weeks.
In all adults, the vaccines appeared to offer strong protection against flu B virus, with a vaccine effectiveness of 78% against illness requiring medical care and 60% against illness serious enough to require hospitalization. Robust protection was even seen in adults aged 65 and older, a group in whom flu can cause serious illness but in whom vaccines may not generate as much protection as they do in younger adults.
The effectiveness of the vaccines against H1N1 viruses was lower, estimated to be 25% against any illness requiring medical care and 50% against flu requiring hospitalization in all adults. The vaccine appeared to be somewhat more effective in adults 65 and older, who are recommended to get specially formulated shots that either contain a high dose of vaccine or include an adjuvant, a boosting compound.
The CDC recommends that everyone 6 months and older should get vaccinated against flu annually. But vaccine uptake has been declining since the Covid-19 pandemic. The CDC estimates that 51% of children and 48% of adults have received flu vaccine this year, with the rate among people ages 65 and older at nearly 74%.
This season’s influenza shots have so far been 42 percent effective, which is consistent with recent years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said this week.
The CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices released the details of the 2023-24 season vaccine effectiveness (VE) estimates Thursday. Among children, the vaccine was 52 to 61 percent effective in preventing flu-associated hospitalizations. It was 41 to 44 percent effective against preventing adult flu hospitalizations.
“These findings indicated that the 2023-24 seasonal influenza vaccine is effective at reducing the risk of influenza-associated outpatient visits and hospitalization,” the CDC said in its report.
The strains selected to be targeted by the flu vaccine are changed each year as authorities seek the best updates to stop the virus.
This season, the vaccine targeted both influenza A and B, and the committee said it was effective at combating both viruses.
“We’re right in the range that we typically see when the vaccine is a good match with the viruses that are circulating. Good VE, and it’s working consistent with past years,” Sascha Ellington, head of the CDC’s flu prevention and control team, said in a statement to CBS News.
The CDC recommends all eligible people 6 months and older receive an annual flu shot.
TOPLINE:
Young children with October birthdays may be better protected against flu, a new study shows. Children tend to receive vaccinations at regular preventive visits the month they were born, and October happens to be an optimal time to get the flu vaccine, the researchers said.
"The findings support current recommendations that children be vaccinated in October preceding a typical influenza season," the authors of the study wrote.
Anupam B. Jena, MD, PhD, with Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, was the corresponding author on the study. The research was published online on February 21 in BMJ.
The availability of the influenza vaccine and the peak of seasonal flu infections vary by year and region.
Researchers disclosed consulting fees from pharmaceutical and healthcare companies unrelated to the study.
This article was created using several editorial tools, including AI, as part of the process. Human editors reviewed this content before publication.
