Flu cases on the rise amid holiday travel, gatherings, latest CDC data shows
Stock photo of a sick child. Natalia Lebedinskaia/STOCK PHOTO/Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — Flu activity is increasing across the U.S. amid holiday travel and gatherings, according to the latest data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The CDC estimates there have been at least 4.6 million illnesses, 49,000 hospitalizations and 1,900 deaths from flu this season so far, according to data updated as of Dec. 19, and experts expect these numbers will continue to rise.
Public health experts previously told ABC News that many of this season’s cases are linked to a new flu strain called subclade K — a variant of the H3N2 virus, which is itself a subtype of influenza A — that has been circulating since the summer in other countries.
Of the 163 samples of H3N2 viruses collected since Sept. 28 and genetically characterized, 89% were subclade K, according to the CDC.
Additionally, three pediatric flu deaths have been reported so far this season, according to an ABC News tally.
Last season, the U.S. saw 288 children die from flu, which is the same number of children who died during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. About 90% of kids who died from flu last year were not vaccinated, a CDC study published earlier this year found.
Meanwhile, New York state is reporting the highest number of flu cases it has ever recorded in a single week.
“The emergency room has been busy, and we’ve been following these numbers,” Dr. Darien Sutton, a board-certified emergency medical physician and ABC News medical correspondent, told “Good Morning America” on Monday. “Just a note, national numbers typically lag during the holiday, but state health department numbers are giving us insight to just how severe this flu season is.”
A total of 71,123 flu cases were reported for the week ending Dec. 20, according to the New York State Department of Health (NYSDOH). This marks the highest number of flu cases in a single week since it became mandatory for states to report in 2004.
This is also 38% higher compared to the previous week which saw 51,365 infections reported, bringing the total flu cases reported in the state to 189,312.
Hospitalizations climbed by 63% in the most recent week, increasing from 2,251 to 3,666 weekly admissions, according to data from NYSDOH.
Sutton said it’s important to understand that flu is present and to take steps to reduce risk, including masking, washing hands with soap and water and getting the flu vaccine.
Currently, the CDC recommends that everyone aged 6 months and older, with rare exceptions, get a flu vaccine.
The federal health agency states on its website that getting an annual flu shot prevents millions of illnesses and flu-related doctors’ visits every year and is especially important for those at higher risk of serious complications.
“The flu is so much more than a simple cold. I am treating it in the emergency room,” Sutton said. “Understand that people are coming in feeling like they are so sick that it has to be something else than the flu.”
Sutton noted that he is seeing more people in the emergency room and more people being hospitalized but that the disease itself is not more severe, adding “it’s not like a super flu.”
(NEW YORK) — As many as 724,000 service members, their families and veterans may rely on health care at hospitals that face financial vulnerability, partly due to cuts in President Donald Trump’s megabill, according to a new analysis.
The bill, known as HR.1, was signed into law in last summer and included sweeping changes to health care including Medicaid. Strict work requirements, reduced federal funding and tightening provider tax rules impacts hospitals that are dependent on Medicaid, increasing their risk of uncompensated care and reducing revenue.
Service members and their families — many of whom are covered by the military health insurance program TRICARE — rely heavily on civilian hospitals for health care, particularly in areas without military treatment facilities.
The analysis, conducted by researchers the Healthcare Quality and Outcomes Lab at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) and first viewed by ABC News, looked at how many TRICARE beneficiaries may be reliant on hospitals considered at risk of financial distress under these new changes.
The researchers said many hospitals rely so heavily on Medicaid reimbursements that cuts to the program under HR.1 will affect care the hospitals provide to other patients, including those in the military community.
“We wanted to get a sense of how many hospitals are potentially at risk for becoming potentially financially unstable with the upcoming looming HR.1 Medicaid cuts,” Dr. Jose Figueroa, co-author of the analysis and associate professor of Health Policy and Management at HPSH told ABC News. “There’s a big focus on rural hospitals, but it is not just rural hospitals at risk, that we were finding that across the country, many urban hospitals are at risk.”
Figueroa said medical services that many TRICARE beneficiaries need are often only offered in civilian hospitals or in civilian health care systems. These beneficiaries are then exposed to hospitals that are potentially at financial risk, he noted.
“Military active duty service members on TRICARE and their families also on TRICARE are increasingly relying on civilian hospitals for their care, even when they’re living within a military base,” Figueroa said. “If we’re finding evidence that there are many hospitals across the country that are at risk, to what extent will that affect military personnel and their families?”
TRICARE is run by the U.S. Department of Defense for those connected to the military, including active duty members, National Guard and reserve members, military retirees and their families. It is not the same as Medicaid, although some may qualify for both.
For their analysis, the team used three different criteria to identify a hospital that might be at risk.
If more than one in four of patients being treated at the hospital are on Medicaid, given that the HR.1. cuts are disproportionally affecting those on the federal health insurance program. If the hospital is a safety net hospital, which serves a large number of patients with no insurance or with Medicaid, or a critical access hospital, which is a rural facility that provides essential health care services to underserved communities. The Altman Z-score, which is an aggregate measure of the financial health of a hospital, combining liquidity, profitability, financial efficiency and solvency measures to categorize a hospital as being at risk for bankruptcy. About 4% of hospitals were considered at higher risk of financial distress — meeting three of the criteria and about 19% were at moderate risk of financial distress — meeting two — according to the analysis.
The team then used a dataset to help to identify 8.9 million TRICARE beneficiaries and their ZIP codes.
The analysis estimated that more than 117,000 TRICARE beneficiaries are currently living on or near military installations potentially exposed to a hospital at higher risk of financial distress. Additionally, more than 607,000 are living near a hospital with a moderate risk of financial distress.
This means that more than 724,000 TRICARE beneficiaries are living in military installation ZIP codes — including bases, camps, posts, depots and stations — where at least one hospital has multiple risk factors for financial distress.
Additionally, more than 3.5 million TRICARE beneficiaries living in ZIP codes without a military installation are potentially exposed to a higher-risk or moderate-risk hospital, the analysis found.
“As a country, we should do our best to take care of the people protecting us,” Figueroa said. “Military personnel and their family members should be protected, and sometimes we have to remind ourselves that drastic cuts to our health care that affect our health delivery system also affects our active military personnel and their families as well.”
Last month, during a Senate hearing, Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force David Wolfe said troops were struggling to get health care appointments and made reference to issues with TRICARE’s reimbursement rate for providers.
“What we’ve all seen over the length of our careers is a gradual erosion in the availability of that health care for our service members and their families,” Wolfe said, according to the Military Times.
Based on the results of the Harvard analysis, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D- Mass., is launching an investigation into how the Pentagon is guiding military families through health care cuts and whether Republicans and the Trump administration consulted the Pentagon before the cuts were made, her office told ABC News first.
Warren is also pressing the Pentagon to explain how these cuts are affecting military readiness.
“Donald Trump is putting troops’ lives on the line in the Middle East while ripping away health care from their families at home,” Warren said in a statement to ABC News. “Republicans swore the Medicaid cuts in their Big Beautiful Bill were about cutting waste, fraud, and abuse — is that what they think of our military families’ health care?”
In a statement sent to ABC News, the Pentagon didn’t address Warren’s comments.
“As with all congressional correspondences, the Department will respond directly to the authors as appropriate,” a spokesperson said.
A Pentagon official also said it wouldn’t be appropriate to comment on the methodology of studies not conducted by the department.
The White House didn’t respond to ABC News’ request for comment.
Pigs are raised by farmers in a rural area of Linquan County, Fuyang City, Anhui Province, China, July 11, 2022. (CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Over the weekend, health officials in Spain reportedly informed the World Health Organization (WHO) of a possible human case of swine flu that may have been caused by person-to-person transmission.
The WHO’s reference laboratory for influenza in Britain is conducting additional tests to confirm the diagnosis, according to Reuters. The patient in Spain did not have direct contact with pigs, according to the wire agency.
Even though health officials reported that the risk to the general public is low, public health experts noted that some people may be concerned about spread after the U.S. experienced dozens of human bird flu cases in 2024 and 2025.
They told ABC News that, while the Spain case may put those who work in public health or who live in the area where it was detected on alert, widespread concern is not necessary yet.
“When we’re in any flu season, we see these sporadic swine flu cases globally,” Dr. Meghan Davis, an associate professor in the department of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told ABC News. “If you’re in the immediate area, certainly pay really close attention to any directives from public health authorities, local health departments, et cetera.”
Davis emphasized the importance of staying informed when it comes to potential public health dangers.
“But someone who’s living at a distance, who is not working directly with animals, just having the awareness to pay attention to any health messaging around this for further guidance, that’s what I recommend,” she said.
What is swine flu?
Swine flu is a respiratory disease commonly found in pigs, which is caused by influenza type A viruses. Just like influenza viruses found in humans, there are different subtypes and strains of swine influenza viruses.
Humans are not typically infected with swine flu viruses, but there have been reports of human infections with influenza viruses that normally circulate in swine, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Notably, in 2009, the H1N1 influenza virus pandemic — sometimes referred to as the swine flu pandemic and caused by bird, swine and human flu viruses — led to an estimated 60.8 million cases, 274,304 hospitalizations and 12,469 deaths in the U.S., CDC data shows.
Occasionally, these virus strains “spill over and can infect humans, but the origin is in swine, and so the majority of these non-human influenza variants are infecting humans because they are in very close contact with swine, so they’re in the pig or pork industry,” Dr. Dean Blumberg, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at University of California, Davis Health, told ABC News.
“Those are the majority of cases, and most cases are transmitted directly to humans and there’s very few cases that are human-to-human transmission,” he added.
Should we be concerned?
Davis said she considers the Spain case to be of high concern for public health but not a major concern for the public currently.
“What that means is, those of us whose job it is to think about and worry about these always worry a bit more when there’s the potential for human-to-human transmission because that may also be a signal that the virus itself is showing characteristics of adaptation,” Davis said.
This is because the more adapted to human-to-human transmission a swine flu virus is, the greater the potential it has to go from person to person without weakening.
“But the public, there are some criteria that I think about in terms of public concern,” Davis added. “If you start hearing about something, for example, like the early days of COVID when it was clear that there were clusters that were circulating in people and that was going person to person, when you start to see a lot of that, that’s when you started to get much more concern.”
Blumberg agrees that there’s no need for major concern yet and that the Spain case points to the need for more surveillance because of the virus’ potential to mutate.
Additionally, researchers will need to characterize the current strain to see if it is more easily transmitted from human to human, he said.
“There’s additional studies that can be done locally to see if there’s been asymptomatic infection of the population that hasn’t been detected yet,” Blumberg said. “And that will help determine whether there’s been more widespread circulation. … I think it does point to the importance of supporting public health so that they can get a handle on this to see if this is something that requires additional attention.”
Signage outside the Center for Disease Control (CDC) headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, US, on Friday, Dec. 5, 2025. (Megan Varner/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
(NEW YORK) — Cigarette smoking among U.S. adults continues to fall to record low levels as e-cigarette use rises, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published early Thursday.
Nearly 10% of adults in the U.S. smoked cigarettes in 2024, the report found. This is down from about 11% in 2023, CDC data shows.
Rates of cigarette use have dramatically fallen since a landmark 1964 Surgeon General report warned about the dangers of cigarette smoking and linked it to lung cancer, chronic bronchitis and other serious diseases.
The 1964 report also found a 70% higher mortality rate among smokers and helped launch a nationwide anti-smoking campaign.
At the time, more than 42% of adult Americans were smokers, according to the Surgeon General.
“Decreased cigarette use is certainly in line with decades of trends and really hard work on the part of public health and education folks to get the word out about how awful cigarettes are and how deadly they are,” Dr. Maria Rahmandar, medical director of the substance use & prevention program in the division of adolescent and young adult medicine at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, told ABC News.
“However, with decreased cigarette use, that means that big tobacco companies are losing money, and so they’re always looking for new ways to capture customers and hook new people on powerfully addictive … nicotine,” she added.
The new CDC report found those living in rural areas were more likely to smoke more than city dwellers. More than 15% of those in non-metropolitan areas smoked cigarettes compared to those living in cities, the report noted.
Meanwhile, the report found that 7% of American adults used e-cigarettes, or vapes, in 2024.
This is a slight uptick from 6.5% of adults reporting e-cigarette use in 2023 and nearly double from the 3.7% of adults who reported using e-cigarettes in 2020, CDC data shows.
“I think we had a shot [at] the first tobacco‑free generation prior to e‑cigarettes coming onto the market. Unfortunately, it’s kind of derailed that progress,” Thomas Carr, director of national policy at the American Lung Association, told ABC News.
The report found that vaping patterns were similar to cigarettes by metro areas, where 6.1% reported using e-cigarettes compared to 9.2% in rural areas.
Previous CDC data found that men; those who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual; and those who report serious psychological distress are more likely to report current e-cigarette use.
The CDC has also previously found that some adults use e-cigarettes to try to quit smoking cigarettes. The health agency notes the Food and Drug Administration has not approved any e-cigarette to help people quit smoking.
Rahmandar said e-cigarettes have been marketed as a way for people to get off cigarettes, which she noted can help. But she cautioned that there are still many unknowns about e-cigarette harms.
“Cigarettes are terrible, and it is possible that e‑cigarettes are safer — not safe — safer than cigarettes,” she said. “So could it be better for somebody to switch that in a harm reduction philosophy? Yes, however, we still don’t know long term effects of e‑cigarettes, either … We know that there are immediate effects. There certainly are harmful chemicals, carcinogens, toxins, heavy metals, respiratory irritants and other things inside of there that certainly can cause immediate harm.”
By age, those between age 45 and 64 were most likely to be smokers followed by those between ages 25 and 44.
Among vapers, those between ages 18 and 24 had the highest prevalence of e-cigarette use followed by those between ages 25 and 44.
Previous CDC data has shown that the majority of young adults who use e-cigarettes have never smoked cigarettes.
“I think this is … the JUUL generation,” Carr said, referencing what was the most popular e-cigarette in the U.S. “From 2017 to 2019, they got teens to get hooked on JUUL, and they’re now adults, and unfortunately, they haven’t been able to quit using e-cigarettes.”
Tiffany Le, MD, is a pediatrics resident at UT Southwestern Medical Center and a member of the ABC News Medical Unit.
ABC News’ Liz Neporent contributed to this report.
