The flu is getting worse, just as the government shuts down.

Uh oh, this is not good.

The flu season is looking particularly bad this year. We already had signs of trouble back in November and December, when it emerged that the flu vaccine was not very effective against the dominant strain that is circulating this year, which is called H3N2.

Until this past Friday, it seemed that the peak of the flu season might have occurred just around the new year, as shown in this chart from the CDC:

The chart shows a peak in the very last week of 2017, and then the number of reported cases seemed to decline. But then on Friday the CDC reported this alarming trend:

That red line spiking upward in the middle of the chart shows the number of flu-like cases reported by the CDC's national network this year. Rather than going down, the trend shows a sharp rise over the past two weeks. We don't know exactly what it is (these are not laboratory-confirmed flu cases), but more people are getting sick.

Even more alarming are the reports of young, healthy people dying of the flu. This past week the Washington Post reported on a healthy 10-year-old boy who caught the flu and died within just a few days. Just before Christmas, a healthy 21-year old young man in Pennsylvania came down with the flu, and went rapidly downhill until he was rushed to the emergency room on Dec. 27. The hospital was unable to save him, and he died the next day. These cases are truly alarming, and even though the CDC hasn't seen a statistically significant increase in deaths among young people (not yet, at least), everyone needs to take the flu very seriously this year.

With the government shut down, a difficult situation becomes worse. Most of the CDC staff will be forced to sit on their hands when they could be working–and many of them want to work, but they won't be allowed to. What's especially frustrating (and wasteful) is that the U.S. will almost certainly pay all federal employees for this forced time off, as it did in previous shutdowns.

We also need a better way to make the flu vaccine. The U.S. still relies on vaccines that are produced by growing the virus in chicken eggs, a decades-old method. This sometimes requires us to use a strain that doesn't match the circulating virus, because some strains just won't grow in eggs. So instead we manufacture a mediocre vaccine, rather than investing in new, modern technology that wouldn't need eggs and could produce more effective vaccines at lower cost. (Why are we stuck with old technology? It's a long story, but essentially it boils down to the fact that we rely completely on private companies to make the flu vaccine. The government doesn't make vaccines and has no plans to do so.)

With the right technology, we should be able to produce a universal flu vaccine, one that we can take once and never need again, like most other vaccines. Scientists are getting closer to that, with much help from the (currently shut down) NIH.

Meanwhile, we are looking at a particularly dangerous flu season, with few weapons to guard against it other than the not-very-good vaccine. (Aside: ineffective doesn't mean useless. Even if the vaccine is only 30% effective, as some estimates have it for this year, it's still a good idea. Everyone in my family got it.)

Oh, and one more thing: the flu shot cannot give you the flu. I only mention this because anti-vaxxers continue to promote this particular myth. 80% of people who have come down with the flu this year did not get vaccinated.