Flu season — 4,000 dead in a week, NJ hospitals restrict visitors

TRENTON — New Jersey has officially reported just one influenza-related death this season, but the Garden State has not been totally immune to the most pronounced flu outbreak in the United States in close to a decade.

The Daily Record reported that several hospitals and systems across the state — Atlantic Health, Hackensack Meridian, Saint Clare's Health, Valley Health, and both Clara Maass Medical Center in Belleville and Englewood Hospital and Medical Center, at least — are now asking all child visitors, as well as adult visitors who may be sick, to stay home.

In the third week of 2018, the most recent time-frame available to the CDC according to Fortune, 4,068 people in the U.S. died from either influenza or pneumonia, or 1 out of every 10 deaths in the country. The Fortune report said the CDC only started counting deaths caused by the flu in children in 2004; New Jersey's sole death so far was that of a 4-year-old girl.

As reported by CNN, the CDC cited updated statistics in saying that flu-related hospitalizations rose in the fifth week of the year to 60 out of every 100,000. That includes the potential for record numbers in the 55-to-64-year-old age bracket.

Deaths from this outbreak are expected to zoom past that of the swine flu epidemic in 2009 and 2010, Fortune reported.