Worst of flu season may be behind us

NEW YORK -- The worst of the flu season appears to be over.

The number of states reporting intense or widespread illnesses dropped again last week, and a few states had little flu going around, U.S. health officials said Friday.

The season started earlier than normal, spreading from the Southeast. But now, by some measures, the flu has been ebbing for at least four weeks in much of the country.

Flu and pneumonia deaths also dropped the last two weeks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

"It's likely that the worst of the current flu season is over," CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said.

But flu is hard to predict, he and others stressed, and late-season spikes have happened before.

For now, states like Georgia and New York -- where doctors' offices were jammed a few weeks ago -- are reporting low flu activity. The hot spots are now the West Coast and the Southwest.

Among the places that have seen a drop: Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest in Allentown, Pa., which put up a tent outside its emergency room last month to help deal with the steady stream of patients. There were about 100 patients each day back then.

Now it's down to 25, and the hospital may pack up its tent next week, said Terry Burger, director of infection control and prevention for the hospital.

"There's no question that we're seeing a decline," she said.

In early December, CDC officials announced that flu season had arrived, a month earlier than usual. They were worried, saying a winter flu season hadn't started like this one in nine years. That was 2003-04 -- one of the deadliest seasons in the past 35 years, with more than 48,000 deaths.

Like this year, the major flu strain was one that tends to make people sicker, especially the elderly, who are most vulnerable to flu and its complications

But that year's flu vaccine wasn't made to protect against that bug, and fewer people got flu shots. The vaccine is reformulated almost every year, and the CDC has said this year's is a good match for the types that are circulating. A preliminary CDC study showed it is about 60 percent effective, which is close to the average.

So far, the season has been labeled moderately severe.

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