Flu Stats: When the Numbers Don’t Add Up
By Cathy Jameson
I read that more than 80,000 Americans died from the flu last year. For years, a much lower figure of 36,000 deaths usually circulated in the news. At one point, the CDC gave a different estimate of 3,900 to 49,000. I couldn’t recall seeing numbers as high as 80,000 before, so I did a little bit of reading about the flu and how it’s tracked. With how many national, state, and local webpages there are devoted to flu statistics, I learned a lot! I haven’t had time to go through everything there is out there, but with that glaring headline that’s making the rounds I’ll be sure to keep reading.
The very first tidbit that caught my eye was the CDC’s yearly statement about flu deaths on their own website. After reading it on several flu summary pages, that 80,000 stat seems to negate what the NYT and other media sources are repeating:
How many people died from flu during the 2017-2018 season?
While flu deaths in children are reported to CDC, flu deaths in adults are not nationally notifiable.
How many people die from flu each year? (2016 – 2017)
CDC does not count how many people die from flu each year. Unlike flu deaths in children, flu deaths in adults are not nationally reportable.
How many people died from flu during the 2015-2016 season?
CDC does not count how many people die from flu each year.
How many people died from flu during the 2014-2015 season?
CDC does not count how many people die from flu each year. Unlike flu deaths in children, flu deaths in adults are not nationally reportable.
Ad nauseum to the 2006-2007 yearly flu summary page:
How many people died from flu during the 2006-07 season?
Exact numbers of how many people died from flu this season cannot be determined. Flu-associated deaths are only a nationally notifiable condition among children, and states are not required to report flu cases or to report adult deaths from influenza to CDC…
If the CDC is stating that they do not count adult cases, then where are they getting the 80,000 figure for deaths? Could it include the pediatric cases, those under the age of 18? I don’t see how if it does. The pediatric statistics are far from 80,000.
I had to keep reading.
What I learned was that while adult flu deaths are not nationally notifiable or required to be reported, complications from the flu in adults, like Influenza & Pneumonia, is tracked within the CDC’s flu database. So are Influenza-Like Illnesses. But not the flu itself. Since I needed more time to wrap my head around what they track and what they chose to report, I decided to take a break and look at those pediatric cases next. Those numbers looked solid.
Pediatric deaths from the flu are documented. The CDC asked for them to start being reported back in 2003 as pediatric flu-associated deaths became a nationally notifiable condition. In 2004, 152 children died from the flu. The following year saw a decrease with 39 deaths. Total cases since 2003 when the CDC began tracking flu deaths in the pediatric population to last year is 1,593.
NYT is off by one, (it’s 181 pediatric deaths reported in 2017-18) but they are right in stating that last year was the worst year for pediatric flu deaths according to the statistics I saw. Other numbers well over 100 deaths were reported several times in the last few years:
146 (or 148 depending on which chart you read) were recorded in 2015.
2013 saw 169 deaths.
2011 saw 115 pediatric deaths.
2010 saw an increase in flu deaths and also included those linked to the H1N1 pandemic. That year, the CDC reported that 348 children passed away.
Looking backwards from 2009 to 2005, less than 100, and some far less than 100 pediatric deaths were reported per year. As I gathered this information, it was interesting to note the changing of the wording some years – some stats had said flu deaths while others said flu-related deaths. I’m not a trained statistician, but curiosity took over. Was it the flu that caused the death, or was it something else? If it was something else besides the flu, I’d think that information wouldn’t be part of these statistics but should have its own separate category elsewhere.
One death is reason to mourn. Any death, no matter the circumstance, is reason to mourn as well. Seeing those pediatric statistics made my heart ache. They’re what drove me to push my instinct aside and get my child a flu shot one year. But I was still wondering about those adult numbers. To me, the numbers weren’t adding up. So, I went looking for more information on other charts and for multiple years in a row.
Most of the other information about adult flu cases were reported in percentages of cases, not straight up numbers like the pediatric cases are. For adults, the Pneumonia & Influenza Mortality Surveillance (P&I) category data was somewhat helpful on the flu data webpages. That gave me info on when the flu peaked in a particular year and how many cases were over or under the national baseline. Percentages of Laboratory-confirmed cases were also listed. But still - no solid numbers were shared. Information on the Influenza-Like Illness Symptoms (ILI) that are tracked didn’t offer specific numbers either. I did learn that the reporting comes from 122 cities in the US and that they’re counting ILI hospitalization and ILI outpatient visits. But no exact number of adult cases like we read about in the pediatric data were offered. Now, I’m not saying it’s wrong to use percentages or a range of data. I was just hoping to find and add up exact numbers myself like I had been able to with the pediatric numbers.
As has happened before, I had more questions than I started out when I took a break from reading.
-Why count actual kids and instead give ranges of percentages for adults? Those ranges may represent thousands or tens of thousands as recent news articles have eagerly reported; but why don’t officials count cases the same way?
-Who are the U.S. sentinel physicians (and providers) reporting the Influenza Morbidity reports and how many of them are there? How and why were these individuals chosen?
-Where are the 122 surveillance cities referenced in the flu season summaries, and why were those locations picked?
-I know it could significantly increase the numbers, but if we’re counting Americans with the flu in America, why aren’t all 19,534 cities in America included in the surveillance? Is it like how the CDC calculates the autism rate from only 11 states and only from a limited cohort of children born after a certain year?
I haven’t had time to find answers for those questions yet, but I will. While I wait to do that, I did have time to start looking at something else. I noticed one new addition to the flu season summary from the 2007 – 2008 year, and boy did it pique my interest. That was the year that the summary added that out of the reported deaths, a certain number were unvaccinated:
Of the 63 cases aged 6 months and older for whom vaccination status was known, 58 (92%) had not been vaccinated against influenza according to the 2007 Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices recommendations. These data are provisional and subject to change as more information becomes available.
Huh, I thought, they included vaccine status - what a novel idea! Since my son had a reaction post flu vaccine, I wanted to see what else the CDC had to say about the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. But that was the one and only year that I saw that information mentioned. I know we can find current data on how many people were compensated post-vaccination for flu (and other) vaccine complications, but I’d be very curious to know something more—has anyone tracked how many flu shots are administered yearly to how many flu deaths occur in the vaccinated yearly? Since we know how many flu vaccines are manufactured (163 – 168 million vaccines for 2018-19), surely we can do a little more math to see how many vaccines administered lead to flu prevention. On the flip side, we can see which ones result in laboratory-confirmed influenza, P&I, and ILI, too. Vax side effects cdc
If I was a betting woman, I’d say the vaccine will likely flop again as it has previous years. That’s because the CDC is telling us the flu shot is only going to be “at least 20% effective” this year. That also means it’s going to be at least 80% ineffective. Even with that terrible rate, everyone aged 6 months and older is being urged to get a flu shot. Experts have a “good hunch” that it’ll do the trick to prevent the flu. To them, and to the officials who tend to over exaggerate how great the flu shot is while pitching how bad each “flu season” will be, I’d rather not get it. The flu is a beast. This I know. But I keep going back to an old adage – you can’t believe everything you read about that hyped up shot. I’m going to apply that to what I saw in other articles as well, that last year was one of the worst flu seasons ever. I understand that it was bad, but was it really 80,000?
Even though I did read some very compelling flu statistics over the last few days, something’s still not adding up. How can it when the “CDC does not count how many people die from flu each year”? That’s clearly and constantly stated on the CDC’s webpages. I don’t know why it is when they definitively state a specific number of deaths reported year after year, like 80,000 last year.
80,000.
That number.
I’d like to research it a bit more because it sounded a little too unbelievable when I first heard it. After doing the reading I was able to on the flu last week, it still does.
Cathy Jameson is a Contributing Editor for Age of Autism.
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Links if you’d like to do your own research:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season...-2017-2018.htm (previous years to 2006 can be accessed on the left side bar)
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weekl...6/weekly09.htm (2005 – 2006)
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5413a2.htm (2004 – 2005)*
*I was able to go back to 1999 – 2000 on the FluView portal.
https://www.cdc.gov/media/pressrel/r2k0622g.htm (1995 – 2000)
https://gis.cdc.gov/GRASP/Fluview/PedFluDeath.html (tracking of pediatric cases)
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/index.htm (current flu vaccine supply information)
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pi...nt-table-2.pdf (listed vaccine ingredients)
https://www.nvic.org/vaccine-laws/st...uirements.aspx (vaccine exemptions by state)
https://hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/data/index.html (Information on the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program)
Posted by Age of Autism on October 07, 2018 at 06:00 AM in Cathy Jameson | Permalink | Comments (34)
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