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Franklin County Public Health is hosting a free flu clinic from 5 to 8 pm Wednesday at Westland Community Center, 146 Galloway Road in Galloway
The shots are open to anyone 6 months or older. Participants do not have to live in Franklin County and no appointment is needed.
State and federal health officials are recommending residents six months and older as soon as possible, according to a statement released by the Ohio Department of Health.
Flu season can last through May, with cases typically peaking between December and February. Vaccines have been updated this year to better circulating flu viruses, officials said.
More than 80,000 Americans died in the winter of 2017-18, the highest number in a decade, federal health officials said last week.
Although 90 percent of those deaths were in people 65 and older, the young women and adolescents, more than in any other year, have been diagnosed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with their current surveillance methods.
The estimates are released to a news conference by the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases to help people get vaccinated and to fight against some people – such as the common misconception that flu shots can cause flu.
The high mortality rate is unusual because it is caused by a "normal" – severe albeit – flu season, not by a new pandemic influenza strain.
In the 2009-10 epidemic flu swine, by contrast, 59 million Americans were thought to have recovered from the disease, but only about 12,000 died because of the infection was relatively mild, according to the CDC.
(That flu, an H1N1 strain, was called a "swine flu," despite the objections of the pork industry, because it emerged in a pig-farming region of Mexico and was the first human flu virus to contain genes from both North American and Eurasian pig flus.)
The dominant strain is an H3N2 flu, which is usually the most important of the seasonal flu strains that typically circulate.
Last season's vaccine was only about 40 percent effective at preventing infection – approximately the same as the previous season's, according to the CDC.
Vaccine effectiveness varies from year to year, from a high of 60 percent in 2010-11 to a low of 19 percent in 2014-15.
It is impossible to know how effective this year's vaccine will be.
Information from The New York Times was used in this story.
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