There Was a Little Girl, and She Had a Little Bird, and She Called It by the Pretty Name of Enza*

In addition to Covid, and the prospect of nuclear war, it now appears that this year's flu season is on a path to be the worst in over a decade.

Following two years of extraordinary mild Flu seasons, largely because of masking, even as half-assed as it has been in the United States, this winter promises to be relatively mask free, with a healthcare system that is running on fumes.

Between Covid and Influenza we are in for a rough ride:

Influenza is hitting the United States unusually early and hard, resulting in the most hospitalizations at this point in the season in more than a decade and underscoring the potential for a perilous winter of respiratory viruses, according to federal health data released Friday.

While flu season is usually between October and May, peaking in December and January, it’s arrived about six weeks earlier this year with uncharacteristically high illness. There have already been at least 880,000 cases of influenza illness, 6,900 hospitalizations and 360 flu-related deaths nationally, including one child, according to estimates released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Not since the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic has there been such a high burden of flu, a metric the CDC uses to estimate a season’s severity based on laboratory-confirmed cases, doctor visits, hospitalizations and deaths.

Not good.

^*It's from a nursury rhyme circa 1918.
It concludes thusly:
But one day it flew away,
but it didn't go to stay,
For when she raised the window,
in-flu-Enza.