NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — Flu cases have surged and forced some Middle Tennessee school districts to cancel classes.
This week, several Middle Tennessee school districts closed their doors to undergo deep cleaning and allow students and faulty to heal before returning on Monday.
“We call it kind of a double peak,” Dr. Todd Rice, professor of medicine with the Vanderbilt University Medical Center Division of Allergy, Pulmonary, & Critical Care, said. “We are starting to see a little bounce from the first peak and it came down. Now, it’s going back up again.”
A map published by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) showed Tennessee was one of nearly a dozen states with a “very high” level of flu-like illness for the week ending on Feb. 1. Inside hospitals across the state, doctors have worked with patients who suffer with severe symptoms.
“You get high fevers, a bad cough and muscle aches that are just debilitating,” Rice said. “They make it so you can barely get out of bed.”
As a result, schools across Middle Tennessee called off classes — some even closed their doors for multiple days as students and teachers were overwhelmed with illness. The time off has helped them recover from illness and allow schools to sanitize.
“When I saw schools saying, ‘We’re not going to have school today because so many kids are out and teachers are out and that sort of stuff,’ I said, ‘Oh yea, this second peak is probably being driven by schools and kids in school.'”
Doctors have also reported an increase in COVID-19, RSV, and Norovirus cases, which have been referred to as the “winter quad-demic.”
“I anticipate in the next week or so that we’ll see rising rates again in the hospital as there is this little bit of a delay between the community cases and the hospitalized cases,” Rice said.
Although doctors say the best time to get the flu vaccine is in the early fall, they’ve encouraged people to get a shot now if they haven’t already, saying it’s not too late to be vaccinated.
“People told me during that first peak that we were kind of seeing around the holidays, ‘Well. it’s too late, we are already seeing influenza,'” Rice said. “Had you gotten vaccinated at that point, you would have been protected at this point and hopefully have less severe disease if you got the flu.”
Rice said no one is immune from the virus, but there are some people more at risk to get the flu. Members of the older population and those who are under 6 are the most at risk for the virus.
As of publication, most school districts in Middle Tennessee plan to open school on time Monday morning. You can follow this link to keep track of all school closings.
