The flu vaccine that you and your family got earlier will pay off over the next couple of weeks, it’s going gangbusters right now. We monitor several different indicators to determine the level of flu activity in the state and all are on the rise right now including increased school nurse and health care clinic visits for influenza-like illness. We’re getting so many reports in that we can’t even enter the data on time. We’ve also been hearing from our partners that there are lots of people with influenza-like illness visiting clinics and emergency rooms. In fact, 13 hospitals (mostly in Maricopa County) are having a hard time keeping up.
We’ve also heard anecdotal stories of short supplies of antiviral medications today. Maricopa County is using their pharmacy surveillance system to find out whether antivirals really are in short supply. If so, we could decide to release some of our leftover federal stockpile antiviral medications from last year’s pandemic to fill the gap over the next week.
