In 2017, a terrible flu season in Australia presaged an American outbreak in which 79,000 died. Experts advise getting the shot soon. Australia had an unusually early and fairly severe flu season this year. Since that may foretell a serious outbreak on its way in the United States, public health experts now are urging Americans to get their flu shots as soon as possible.
“It’s too early to tell for sure, because sometimes Australia is predictive and sometimes it’s not,” said Dr. Daniel B. Jernigan, director of the influenza division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “But the best move is to get the vaccine right now.” The number of cases of flu in this country is still quite low, according to the weekly C.D.C. FluView released Friday. But as the weather cools, it is expected to ramp up. In 2017, Australia suffered its worst outbreak in the 20 years since modern surveillance techniques were adopted. The 2017-2018 flu season in the United States, which followed six months later as winter came to the Northern Hemisphere, was one of the worst in modern American memory, with an estimated 79,000 dead.
This year’s Australian outbreak began in April, two months earlier than usual, and persisted into October. Alarming early reports said the number of deaths might surpass those in 2017, but that did not quite happen. (The country did have more positive flu tests than ever before, but that was in part because far more tests were performed.). Nonetheless, there were more flu-related deaths than usual, while hospitalization rates and nursing home outbreaks “were at moderate to high levels,” said Ian Barr, deputy director of World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Reference and Research on Influenza in Melbourne. Direct comparisons of mortality rates are difficult, because Australia counts only deaths in which a hospital declares influenza the cause; there were 662 this year, and 745 in 2017. Not only is the United States population 13 times bigger, but the C.D.C. — aware that flu triggers even more deaths from pneumonia, sepsis, heart attack and other illnesses — looks at the increased death rates from many illnesses in bad flu years, and calculates how many were probably due to influenza.
At the peak of the 2017-2018 season, the C.D.C. estimated that more than 56,000 Americans would die. Officials later calculates that 79,000 had— which, the agency noted, is more people than usually fill a Super Bowl stadium. In 2017, Australia’s deadly season set off alarm bells in Britain, where tabloids featured headlines about the "killer Aussie flu". But no such dire warnings were issued to Americans, in part because of turmoil at the C.D.C. and its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services.
Last month, Dr. Price’s successor, Alex M. Azar II, also got a flu shot on camera at a news conference that National Foundation for Infectious Diseases holds every year to urge Americans to get vaccinated. Mr. Azar — who stayed through the question and answer session — made it clear that the Trump administration is firmly behind vaccination......
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