The flu season has surged again in the Nashville area, closing schools and flooding emergency rooms — and health officials are reviving their vaccination pleas amid a deadly year for flu-related illnesses.
Ken Whitehouse, a father of two in Nashville, prides himself on never going to the doctor. So his family was in disbelief after he got so sick Friday night that he went directly to a walk-in clinic the next morning.
“Frankly, after seeing all the reports of what is going on across the nation and having two little girls that are home — 5 and 3 — I didn’t want to do anything that would jeopardize them,” he says.
Whitehouse started taking Tamiflu to help with the symptoms. But his 3-year-old still got a fever the next day, despite being vaccinated. They’re both slowly recovering, he says.
Centers for Disease Control data shows 2018 has now tied the 2009 swine flu outbreak in severity, and infectious disease experts say the H3N2 strain that’s going around this year has particularly vicious symptoms and is hard to fight off, even with the vaccine.
Still, they’re encouraging people to get vaccinated. State officials are marketing “flu shot Friday” to encourage participation. They have even been offering shots for free at public health departments in what’s becoming an extended and severe flu season nationwide.
Locally, while there was a spike of flu cases in January, activity has picked back up again, with Nashville emergency rooms reporting the season’s highest levels of reported flu symptoms over the last few days, according to Metro’s public health department.
“We haven’t seen a downturn yet,” says Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt professor who tracks infectious diseases for public health agencies. “We were hoping that perhaps we had reached our peak and things would be getting better.”
This week, the flu spawned another wave of school closures, with at least five Tennessee counties calling off class for the rest of the week.
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