Flu season ends as one of mildest ever in Pennsylvania
Jun. 9—Two numbers provide a stark illustration of just how mild the most recent flu season was in Pennsylvania.
The first is 3,664. That's the total number of laboratory-confirmed influenza cases reported across the commonwealth throughout the 2020-21 season, which began Sept. 27 and ended May 22.
The second is 3,768. That's how many laboratory-confirmed cases were reported during the previous season in 2019-20 — in Luzerne County alone.
Assessing what the state Department of Health characterized as one of the mildest flu seasons on record in Pennsylvania, local and state health officials pointed to two factors: the record number of state residents who got the flu vaccine and the measures people took against the COVID-19 pandemic.
Both were major contributors to the mild season in the state and locally, said Dr. Pragya Dhaubhadel, an infectious disease specialist at Geisinger Community Medical Center in Scranton who is director of infection prevention and control in Geisinger's Northeast region.
With people heeding the advice of public health officials last fall to get a flu shot, the level of vaccine coverage was tremendously higher than in years past, she said. At the same time, people modified their behaviors in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
"The mitigation strategies that have been adopted for COVID-19 definitely had a direct impact on influenza — like wearing a mask, hand hygiene, physical distancing and not going into a gathering or crowd," Dhaubhadel said.
State Acting Secretary of Health Alison Beam agreed.
"The low flu activity, in part, is a testament to effective COVID-19 mitigation efforts that also prevent the flu, since the two infectious diseases spread the same way," Beam said.
The 3,664 cases reported statewide was a decrease from 131,282 cases confirmed during the 2019-20 flu season. The number of flu-associated deaths statewide dropped from 198 to 45.
Case numbers for Lackawanna and other area counties for the 2020-21 flu season were unavailable.
Although flu cases were reported in all 67 counties, because there were so few of them, the Department of Health said per-county figures would not be released to protect the confidentiality of patient health information.
Across the entire Geisinger system, it was an "extraordinarily low" flu season, Dhaubhadel said.
"In fact, for me, we did not have a single case of influenza in Geisinger Community Medical Center. We did not see any admitted patients," she said.
During the 2019-20 flu season, there were 10,439 confirmed cases reported across Northeast Pennsylvania, according to health department records.
In addition to the 3,768 cases in Luzerne County, the count included Lackawanna, 2,241; Monroe, 2,182; Pike, 388; Susquehanna, 327; Wayne, 1,383, and Wyoming, 150.
Contact the writer: dsingleton@timesshamrock.com, 570-348-9132
