Mortality Quick Take: Yes, It's a Bad Flu Season
A bit worse than our prior bad flu season of 2017-2018
I’ve been a little light on the writing here of late because:
Sumo! and there has been SUMO DRAMA! March 16 (lots of guys lost weight and new Yokozuna), March 17 (new Yokozuna with some embarrassing losses), March 18 (new Yokozuna dropped out)… and the drama continues with the wrestlers who are left, because I bet we get a playoff on day 15.
Busy life. D has been bowling, insurance company annual statements have been released, and I’ve got a bunch of data to crunch. And I do other things, as you see in my Sunday posts.
Anyway, people have been asking me about the flu season, and I’m here to tell you:
YES, IT’S BEEN BAD.
FluView Interactive: A Handy Dashboard
First, let me tell you about FluView Interactive.
I have been using this site going back to 2016, because one of the substantial areas I cover for my job is group life insurance. Seasonal flu affects the results of group life as well as other insurance areas.
You will notice that along the bottom they have “MMWR Week” labeled, because that’s the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report counting of weeks in each year.
Each week starts on a Sunday and ends on a Saturday, and each year has either 52 or 53 weeks (and yes, sometimes the dates slide over into a subsequent or preceding year, we deal.) Here’s a handy guide from New Mexico with the MMWR weeks for 2006 - 2025 all labeled for you.
Each “flu season” starts in MMWR week 40 (which is around the first week of October). So if I refer to “flu season 2017-2018”, that means about October 2017 - September 2018, but the peak is about January 2018.
I’m a life actuary, so I focus on death.
Let me just focus on flu deaths here.
Flu deaths, 2016-2025 (so far)
This is the count of flu deaths, by week.
I translated the MMWR weeks to dates (I hope you don’t mind I translated the weeks to the Saturday on which the week ended as opposed to the midweek date. I’m lazy that way.)
All this data ultimately comes from CDC aggregation of death certificates, where Influenza (J09-J11 in ICD-10 codes) was the Underlying Cause of Death.
I’m not including Pneumonia (J12-J18).
As you can see, the current flu season (2024-2025), death-wise, is about as bad as the 2017-2018 season.
Do you remember how bad that one was?
I mean, I do, but that’s my job.
Flu deaths as a percentage of total deaths
Here is the graph in a different way, and the current flu season looks worse by this view: flu deaths as a percentage of total deaths.
Frankly, though, I’m not calling it yet… because while I do assume most or all of the flu deaths have been reported, I do not assume all the U.S. deaths for recent weeks have been reported.
There is a difference.
I wouldn’t be surprised, once all is said and done, that our current flu season is just as bad as the 2017-2018 season.
And yes, we get these “bad” seasons every so often.
Disappearance of flu deaths during COVID pandemic
You may be wondering: what happened with flu from about March 2020 to September 2022?
I mentioned this in prior posts, but this is the main one:
Alas, it’s a video-heavy post so let me turn this into text.
During the heaviest time of COVID, yes, flu deaths went away, but not only flu deaths, flu morbidity (that is, people being sick from the flu).
People liked coming up with conspiracy theories on this: “They aren’t testing for the flu!” They were testing for the flu - I know, as I was tested for the flu, as were my children, every time we were also tested for COVID.
Now, I can spin conspiracies that they lied about the test results… but they could have kept lying about those test results indefinitely, eh?
No, I think flu disappeared for a stint, except for a very small amount (there were some small numbers of flu deaths. It wasn’t zero. It was just extremely low counts that you can’t see them very well.)
I am not a doctor, epidemiologist, virologist, etc. Flu wasn’t the only thing extinguished during the height of COVID. I had heard of viral interference, but the main thing I need to know is that is can happen, not its full mechanism.
In any case, the flu pattern I’m seeing this season is not unusual. I’ve seen it before. And not that long ago.
Good update.
I know we see this differently (and am okay with that) :)
For reference: https://www.woodhouse76.com/p/yes-the-cdc-lies-about-flu-deaths