Posted on 12/05/22
| News Source: Washington Post
Nearly every U.S. state is battling high levels of flu-like illness, public health authorities warned Monday as multiple respiratory viruses threaten to overwhelm the health-care system while people travel for the holidays and gather indoors with friends and family.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials say they’re seeing signs of an early and severe flu season that turned significantly worse during Thanksgiving week, the official start of the holiday season.
That ferocious return of influenza is coinciding with the start of a third pandemic winter – with a novel coronavirus that never left.
“It’s a perfect storm for a terrible holiday season,” said the chair of the American Medical Association board, Sandra Fryhofer, an Atlanta infectious-diseases physician who joined a Monday briefing by the CDC.