U.S. Bracing for 1.8 Million Flu Hospitalizations, Frieden Says
By Dawn Kopecki
Sept. 6 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. is bracing for as many as 1.8 million hospital admissions for flu as students return to school and cases surge to unprecedented levels, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Thomas Frieden said.
“We generally expect that flu will go up after it starts, but this is really something we haven’t seen before,” Frieden said today on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “It’s very unusual to see it start to increase this rapidly in August and September.”
President Barack Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology reported that as much as half of the U.S. population could become infected with swine flu, also known as the H1N1 influenza virus, this winter, leading to as many as 90,000 deaths and 1.8 million hospital admissions.
Frieden said the CDC agrees with the council’s findings. “It’s really important to prepare for scenarios that are severe,” he said. “And they outline one such scenario, and we are, in fact, preparing for that.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Dawn Kopecki in Washington at dkopecki@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: September 6, 2009 13:53 EDT |
