Nina Alvarado Silverman couldn’t shake the cold as she stood outside with her kindergarten class in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Back in the heated classroom and still wrapped in her jacket, exhaustion set in. By the end of the day, the 28-year-old teacher could barely walk home.
“I felt so awful,” said Alvarado Silverman. “My whole body hurt.” Bedridden with fever, loss of appetite, and body aches, the next morning she dragged herself out of her apartment and into an urgent care facility in Crown Heights, her neighborhood. The doctor asked for her symptoms and swabbed her nose to collect fluid samples.
She tested positive for Influenza A, a type of virus that causes the flu. “They gave me Tamiflu and Tylenol,” she added. “It took me at least another week to fully feel like myself again.”
When Alvarado Silverman returned to work after resting for three days, she learned that her co-teacher and at least a third of her 24 students called out due to the flu.
“I think there were seven or eight confirmed cases in my class, then me and my co-teacher, and then I think one of the parents had it also,” she said. “We were the most affected class.”
Influenza A drove the majority of cases in this flu season, which spread nationwide and affected people like Silverman and her class. The outbreak resulted in at least 40 million illnesses, 520,000 hospitalizations, and 22,000 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control. And New York has not been spared. While flu activity began to decline in early February, it remains significantly higher than in past seasons. The NY State Department of Health reports more than 432,700 people have tested positive for the flu. Although infections have dropped nearly 60% since the peak, hospitalizations are still more than 30% higher than at this time last year.
“This has been a pretty brutal flu season across the United States,” Dr. Syra Madad, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Chief Biopreparedness Officer at New York City Health + Hospitals, said during a Zoom interview.
The flu doesn’t discriminate. People traveling are also vulnerable to it. In mid-January, Aoibheann Sweeney, 56, an American writer who used to live in New York City and now lives in Dublin, came to visit for a week. She came to celebrate her birthday but spent most of her time sick. At least five out of eight friends she saw at a bunch right before falling sick also reported having the flu.
“I just couldn’t believe that all those people got sick,” she said. “They were all my closest friends and suddenly five of them are completely down.”
Experts attribute the spike to a combination of factors, including decreased immunity, low vaccination rates, reduced measures of mask-wearing and social distance, as well as the continued circulation of multiple respiratory viruses.
Madad says getting the annual flu vaccine offers the best protection against the virus. “Even though it may not prevent you from getting actual seasonal flu or transmitting it to others, it does help prevent you from experiencing a severe illness, being hospitalized, or even dying from influenza.”
Madad’s sons, ages 9 and 11, both contracted influenza this flu season, “but it was a very mild case, and that’s because they were vaccinated against influenza.”
Seasonal influenza has killed more people than COVID, Dr. Keith Roach, an associate attending physician at NewYork-Presbyterian and an associate professor of clinical medicine at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, said in a Zoom interview. The week ending March 1, Influenza caused nearly twice as many deaths as COVID, according to the CDC data.
In most cases, when people die from the flu, it’s because it caused pneumonia, explained Roach. “The people who are at biggest risk for death are our very oldest patients but also our very youngest patients,” he said.
The CDC recommends that everyone six months and older get a flu shot each year. Cases are in decline, but experts explain people will still face several more weeks of relatively high amounts of flu activity. The flu vaccine takes about two weeks before it becomes effective and they insist it’s still not too late to get some of its protection.
“What’s the downside of getting a flu shot?” asked Roach. “You get a sore arm — it’s not that big a deal from the risk-benefits standpoint.”
