This year’s flu is hitting younger people especially hard, Yahoo News reports.
In Nova Scotia, at least eight people between the ages of 45 and 64 have died after contracting influenza, according to The Chronicle Herald.
And across Canada, kids aged five to nine have been disproportionately affected by the respiratory infection. They made up 14 per cent of all cases in 2018/19—at least double the rate of epidemics of 2015/16 and 2013/14, according to a new Eurosurveillance study.
“In general, healthy young people are at low risk of death due to influenza, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen and it does happen,” says the study’s lead author Dr. Danuta M. Skowronski, epidemiology lead of influenza and emerging respiratory pathogens at the BC Centre for Disease Control. “H1N1 [a strain of Type A influenza] tends to have a more youthful profile.
