An intense flu season is filling hospitals with severely ill patients

The US is in the throes an unusually intense and severe flu season, with hospitalization rates topping the levels seen with Covid-19 at some points of the pandemic.

The US is in the throes of an unusually intense and severe flu season, with hospitalization rates topping the levels seen with Covid-19 at some points of the pandemic. On top of the flu infection itself, doctors say they’re seeing large numbers of patients with some of its most devastating complications. In children, specialists say they’re seeing more than usual come to the hospital with neurologic complications, including devastating brain swelling that leads to tissue death — a condition called acute necrotizing encephalopathy, or ANE. In adults, there are unexpected levels of pneumonia caused by flesh-eating superbug bacteria. “We’re seeing a lot of MRSA pneumonia and really bad MRSA pneumonia after influenza, so what we call necrotizing, where you’re getting a lot of destruction of the lung tissue,” said Dr. John Lynch, an infectious disease specialist at UW Medicine. MRSA is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a type of bacteria that shrugs off a lot of the antibiotics available to treat it. The infection can be deadly, but a person who survives this kind of pneumonia may also have scarred lungs, diminishing the ability to breathe normally during everyday activities.