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Despite a “double barrel” flu season, the vaccine does its job above all

Despite a strange flu season, this year’s flu vaccine works relatively well in preventing the flu, especially in children, according to a new report.

In the new report, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated the effectiveness of the flu vaccine in more than 4,000 American children and adults who went to the doctor for respiratory illness between October 23, 2019 and January 25, 2020..

Overall, the vaccine was 45% effective, which means it reduced the risk of a doctor’s visit for flu by 45%, the report said. The vaccine worked even better in children, reducing the risk of a flu visit to the doctor by 55%.

Influenza vaccines are generally 40 to 60 percent effective when the circulating strains of influenza match the vaccine strains, and estimates for this year are within that range, the authors said.

This season’s flu vaccine also works better than last season’s vaccine, which was estimated to be only 29% effective in reducing doctor visits for the flu.

This season’s vaccine may work well due to the types of influenza virus circulating. The main strains of influenza circulating this season are influenza B and H1N1; and influenza vaccines generally offer better protection against these strains than with H3N2, which was the dominant strain at the start of the 2018-2019 influenza season.

Still, during the 2018-2019 flu season, the flu vaccine would have prevented 4.4 million illnesses, 2.3 million medical visits, 58,000 hospitalizations and 3,500 deaths from the flu, according to the CDC. (Data on the number of illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths avoided this season are not yet available.)

The 2019-2020 flu season was a strange one – at the start of the season the main strain of flu in circulation was flu B, which usually doesn’t cause as many cases as the flu strains A (H1N1 and H3N2) and tends to show up later in the season. But at the end of January and February, the authorities noted a strong increase in the activity of H1N1. This type of “double barrel” flu season, in which one strain of flu hits another’s heels, is also unusual, Live Science previously reported.

So far this season, there have been around 26 million illnesses, 250,000 hospitalizations and 14,000 deaths from influenza in the United States, according to the CDC.

If you missed your flu shot earlier in the season, it may not be too late to get one – although it is best to get the flu shot in the early fall, before Influenza activity does not resume, the CDC continues to recommend influenza vaccines while influenza viruses are circulating. And this flu season seems to be going on longer than usual – flu activity has already been elevated for 21 weeks, which is longer than the average duration of around 18 weeks, according to the new report.

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