HHS to maintain free at-home COVID tests by mail—for now
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In the 2022-23 respiratory virus season, 379,300 people in the United State were hospitalized for influenza, with median cumulative state rates of 23.2 to 249.0 per 100,000 people, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-led research team reports.The aim of the study, recently published in the American Journal of Public Health, was to develop a way to use hospital-based surveillance to estimate hospitalizations for flu by state, age, and month and, ultimately, improve flu burden estimation.The team analyzed Influenza Hospitalization Surveillance Network (FluSurv-NET) data to estimate monthly hospitalization rates and compared the results with those from other sources."Although the CDC has a long-established history of estimating the influenza disease burden at the national level, routine and robust methods to estimate state-level influenza-related hospitalization burdens have been lacking," the researchers wrote.States often report crude or unadjusted flu hospitalization data from FluSurv-NET or the National Healthcare Safety Network, which the authors said may underestimate the true disease burden owing to multiple underdetection factors, they added.State rates varied widelyA total of 379,300 people were hospitalized for flu from October 2022 to April 2023, with a cumulative hospitalization rate of 114.5 per 100,000 people. Median cumulative state rates were 23.2 (Alaska) to 249.0 (New York) per 100,000 people.Our results provide a complementary framework to calculate estimates at finer geographic scales.The highest cumulative rate was seen among those aged 85 years or older (625.2 per 100,000 people), and the lowest was among those aged 18 to 49 (47.7 per 100,000).Overall, the researchers' model estimates captured state hospitalization time trends and slightly more cases than other sources of reported hospitalizations at the state level, probably owing to adjustments for testing probability and diagnostic sensitivity."Our estimates were comparable to national burden estimates incorporating other approaches while accounting for variations in the timing and geography of disease activity and changes in detection and reporting," the researchers wrote. "Our results provide a complementary framework to calculate estimates at finer geographic scales."
