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The flu season is going strong. About six million to seven million people in the United States have come down with the illness so far, with half of them sick enough to have seen doctors, according to estimates released on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Some 69,000 to 84,000 ended up in the hospital during the period from Oct. 1, 2018 through Jan. 5. (Grady, 1/11)

“We decided that this year, we would try to release these preliminary numbers of illnesses each week so that we could give people a better picture,” said Alicia Fry, who heads the CDC’s epidemiology and prevention branch in the influenza division. The CDC releases a report each week on seasonal influenza in the United States, along with detailed graphs and charts. But until Friday, the reports did not provide data on how many people have gotten sick, gone to the doctor, been hospitalized or died. The agency released that information at the end of each season after analyzing the data. (Sun, 1/11)

It's early, but the current flu season is shaping up to be gentler than last winter's unusually brutal one, U.S. health officials said. In most parts of the country, most illnesses right now are being caused by a flu strain that leads to fewer hospitalizations and deaths as the kind of flu that dominated a year ago, according to officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Vaccines also work better against it, said the CDC's Dr. Alicia Fry. (1/11)

But the general public may not grasp the significance of the fact that in the last week of December, for instance, 4.1 percent of doctors office visits were for influenza-like symptoms. This week’s report — estimating that between 2.9 million and 3.5 million people have been to a doctor so far this season because they have the flu — makes more sense, officials believe. “It’s easier for people to understand,” Fry said. (Branswell, 1/11)

The odyssey that led to the Ventura County Health Care Agency’s jarring December announcement that as many as 23,000 flu shots, vaccinations and treatments may have been neutralized because drugs were too cold started with the discovery that many of the medicines were warm to the touch. In October 2017, county pharmacy leaders worried that many vaccines and other medicines were being disposed of because they were warming to room temperatures during their delivery from Ventura County Medical Center to a network of agency-affiliated clinics sprawled across the county. (Kisken, 1/11)