5 hours Ago By By Natalia Gurevich | Examiner staff writer
San Francisco recorded its first flu death of the season, the Department of Public Health announced Friday. The person who died was over the age of 65 and had not received this year’s flu vaccine, the department said, and died in late November. While the peak of the flu season typically doesn’t hit until January before petering out until March or sometimes April, UCSF infectious-disease expert Dr.
Peter Chin-Hong, told The Examiner that the timing of this death is not surprising. “Flu kills 35,000 to 50,000 people every year,” he said of the national totals. “It’s still something we need to vastly improve on in terms of the utilization of the tools we have to protect ourselves and our loved ones.
” He said he anticipates a rougher flu season this winter, pointing to other parts of the world that have already experienced their winter seasons in the Southern Hemisphere where hospitalizations were even higher this year than last year. “One of the hypotheses is that it's the kind of flu that's circulating,” Chin-Hong said, referencing one type, H3N2 in particular, as being “notorious for causing more serious disease.” Chin-Hong pointed to the wave of cases hitting the United Kingdom right now as an indicator of what we have to expect.
England’s National Health Service said Thursday that the number of hospitalizations of people with the flu had risen 70% in the last week . The evolution of bird flu, or H5N1, this year is another reason to be concerned, Chin-Hong said, as the disease has been hopping from birds over to mammals. “The more times you have a transmission, the higher the chance you'll get a mutation that will make it easier to enter humans,” he said.
Another factor that will make this flu season more challenging is that the uptake of the vaccine just hasn’t been where it ought to be, Chin-Hong said. This poses a risk for everyone, he said, especially for those who are over the age of 65 and have other underlying conditions. Resources for treating and testing for the flu just aren’t as widely available as they are for COVID-19, Chin-Hong said.
“The devil is always in the details of putting all the ingredients together and having people aware of what resources they have,” he said. The department announced on Friday that people can visit sf.gov/vax for more information on vaccinations and advised people to wear well-fitting, high-quality masks such as a KF94, KN95, or N95s when indoors and in crowded spaces.
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