no idea, and good question. my hunch is that, since they werent testing for swine flu in most cases, and they were calling it swine flu based on time of year, and since we're now in regular "seasonal flu season" - my guess would be that it's over? any flu is now seasonal flu?? NO idea. such a weird thing.
We had our biggest hit in early october and has steadly decreased since then. I was talking to my doctor and she said, when it was bad, it was really bad here. The hospitals were overflowing with really sick people with respitory issues and we had 5 or 6 deaths of people with no other pre-existing conditions in NS (pop 1 mil).
everyone here got the vacine. There wasn't the negative push on getting the vacine here and there was less of the extra added stuff that caused so much frenzy in the USA.
We had a decline at the end of the semester here on campus. I would say peak was about Halloween. We anticipate an uptick of a mix of h1n1 and seasonal (and at that point, we won't really knw which is which) when the students return in January. Students bring back lots of illness to campus from hometowns, so those first 3 weeks or so are always a blast.
We seem to be pretty quiet now at school. I fully am prepared for the return from break. When everyone travels and brings the crap back here and it all starts up again.
Did anyone read somewhere about how the reg. flu strain is not even being seen right now? Did I make that up in my head?
When I took Bryson into the ped last Thursday, Anna his nurse told me that they hadn't seen a case since December 4th prior to that they had been seeing 6-7 a day. She told me what they expect it to start back up again soon, I don't know where they get that information from, but i'm not surprised, seems like lots of illnesses do that, Right now it seems like the dreaded tummy bug is going around in lots of regions. Blah.
My Dh was just at a continuing medical education conference, and the topic was infectious diseases. There was a world-renowned (that's what they called him) doctor/speaker there to talk about swine flu, and he said it will come back in a month or so.
He also said that anyone who doesn't get their children vaccinated is being foolish (or something along those lines---I wasn't there......he probably said it in a more tactful way).
Oops! My children aren't vaccinated, and I am still not planning on getting it. My Dh wants them to be vaccinated, but it's not like he's bringing the shot home from work and giving it to them without my knowing.
I haven't heard much of anything about it here since we all had it in October. Practically everyone in their classes had it then.
I guess I am a fool because i am not giving them the vax and I don't intend to. I realize there are issues of complications and you never know how bad things can get, but the flu here was actually a lot easier on me than stomach viruses they get. They feel just as bad with both, but with the flu, they could actually eat, drink and keep things down. I had to push them on it, but that was a lot easier than giving them something to eat or drink (or holding them back from eating too much) and then throwing it back up 20 minutes later. Having had both things so far this year, I can say the stomach virus was worse in our house.
The major problem we had with the flu (aside from the spike in Kate's fever-which thankfully was short lived) was that they both had secondary infections afterwards. Even taking that into account, I was less worried about them than I was with this last vomiting thing we had...
IHNI what to expect when the kids go back. But I am sure it is going to be a crappy year for illness all around.
And Melissa, I was under the impression that the seasonal flu strain generally doesn't show up at this time of year? IDK for sure, but that was my understanding-that it is generally a bit later? (they did get their regular flu mist-I debated about it, but they have had it in year's past without incident, so I went ahead with it)
