Health Department Stats Show Flu Spike for Children Ages 0-4
Watch this video from NBC 5, where they interviewed Kane County Health Department staff about the uptick in flu activity.
It’s official. The Kane County Health Department’s weekly monitoring report shows the big jump in flu cases locally.
In Week 8, which ended Feb. 27, statistics from the five reporting Kane County hospitals showed that 7.1 percent of emergency room visits were for influenza-like illness.
As of Tuesday (March 1, 2016), Presence Mercy Medical Center initiated age restricted visitor guidelines and began conducting flu symptom checks upon entry. The medical center sent out a news releases to that affect, and the numbers were confirmed by the Health Department’s weekly report, which was posted Friday, March 4.
You can read the Week 8 report here, and the graphics in the report tell the tale in a glance.
During Week 8, six labs reported that 393 of 971 (40.5 percnet) of specimens tested for influenza were positive. Of these 393 specimens, 368 (93.6 percent) were positive for influenza A, 21 (5.3 percent) were positive for influenza B, and 4 (1 percent) were positive for influenza A/B. No other specimen tested positive for the week ending Feb. 27, 2016.
The bad news? The biggest jump is for children ages 0 to 4.
The good news? ILI absenteeism rate for public schools in Kane County was 0.29 percent, and no schools had ILI absenteeism above the 5 percent threshold. No influenza-associated deaths were reported to the Health Department, and as of the report date, zero outbreaks of influenza have been reported in Long-Term Care/Assisted Living facilities in Kane County.
In all, there were 393 positive cases in Week 8, compared to a little more than 100 in Week 4. Here’s what the graph looks like:
SOURCE: Kane County Health Department Weekly Flu Surveillance Report
