Pennsylvania Hospital Erects Tent for Flu Outbreak, CDC Says ‘Worst in a Decade'

The CDC warns ‘the worst flu outbreak in a decade is to be in 2013′.

Lehigh Valley Hospital has now erected and staffed an emergency triage tent to take in an increasing number of flu victims.

NBC 10 Philidelphia reported;

The State Department of Health reports that four Pennsylvanians have already died of complications from the influenza virus.

In response to the early start of flu season, the Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest had to open an emergency space to care for the increased number of people with flu-like symptoms.

The hospital tells NBC10′s Katy Zachry why the tent was erected.

“If we can remove them from the main ED and put them in environment where everyone is masked and everyone can be protected, it’s safer for them and certainly safer for the staff,” said Terry Burger, hospital director of infection control.

The mobile surge tent is set up outside the emergency department.

Is this a glimpse at what could be coming to a town near you?

This years flu rhetoric is ramping up once again.

Look at what USA Today reports;

That’s because the current flu season is turning out to be a bad one, affecting more people than usual, starting earlier and covering a broader geographical area. Government health experts say 18 children, under age 18, have died because of the seasonal flu and 2,257 people had been hospitalized with flu symptoms through the end of 2012.

“The sense that everybody has is that there’s been an extremely rapid increase in influenza,” says Trish Perl,co-leader of a flu study encompassing about 100 clinics in several cities. She is also an epidemiologist for the Johns Hopkins Health System in Baltimore. “It has been relatively widespread across the United States.”

The public should be concerned, says Gregory Poland, professor of medicine and infectious disease at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

“A decade ago, when we had widespread circulation (of the seasonal flu), we had 70,000 deaths in the U.S.,” says Poland, who directs Mayo’s Vaccine Research Group.

“We have this cultural thing in the U.S. about, ‘Oh, it’s just the flu.’ I was telling a group yesterday, imagine in October I said, ‘We expect a virus to be circulating in the U.S. and it will kill 30- or 40,000 Americans.’ Can you imagine the panic that would ensue?”

For the fourth week in a row, the proportion of people seeing health care providers for flulike illness is above the national baseline, and jumped from 2.8% to 5.6% in that time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Last season’s proportion peaked at 2.2%, the CDC reports.

More: http://www.thedailysheeple.com/pennsylva…%b2_012013

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