Flu season typically runs from October through April.
Washing your hands thoroughly and often, avoiding people who are sick, and wearing a mask can help, but the flu vaccine is considered the most effective weapon against the virus.
KERA's Sam Baker talks with Dr. Natalia Gutierrez, a Family Medicine physician with Texas Health Plano and Texas Health Physicians Group, about this year's vaccine.
Dr. Gutierrez: This year, we have three main strains that are going to be covered by the flu vaccine. They're called H1N1, H3N2, and B1. This is a whole different new vaccine that we have this year.
You have the same dose from six months to about 64 years old, and then a higher dose for those 65 and over.
We have the flu mist back, which is the nasal spray, and that's only for those two through 49 years of age.
Baker: How effective is the Flu Mist as compared to the actual shot?
The FluMist seems to be doing well this year, but it does have restrictions. You can't get it if you have asthma, you can't get it if you're immunosuppressed, because it's a spray. It also has a different formulation in how it's made. So, the FluMist is a little different, but flu shots, anybody can get them for six months and up.
Baker: Does the flu shot prevent you from getting the flu period, or is it kind of like the COVID-19 vaccine? Does it minimize the impact if you get the virus?
Both vaccines can actually prevent you from getting the infection, and both vaccines can minimize the effects of the infection, but they're not 100 percent.
Flu is probably between 30 and 60 percent, so that means if we have a convention and there are 100 people there and they are 100 percent vaccinated, over half of them will be protected if we expose them.
But what happens if you do get the flu and you have the flu shot? So, what we do see is that the people who make it to the hospital. And the people who die from flu, most were not vaccinated. So, it does decrease your chances of death, hospitalizations, and complications.
We did have a new condition they've been studying in the last couple of years, which is called necrotizing encephalitis, which is pretty serious. And what they did realize is that most of the kids who got this were not vaccinated. So, if you grab all the kids that died from the flu in the last season, 90% of them were not vaccinated. So, it does protect quite a bit.
So, even if you still get the flu and you were vaccinated, it still improves your chances of not being as sick, of not being in the hospital, and of not missing as many work days. So, the flu shot is very, very important for all of us.
Do people have the right idea about flu? I think there's still a tendency for some to think that with flu, you get rest, you stay hydrated, you're over it, it's done.
This year we had the highest hospital admissions in the last 15 years. We had 610,000 people hospitalized. 27,000 died from the flu.
So, it is true that some people get the flu and don't get super sick. But in January, February, and the beginning of March, we were running like crazy here, taking care of everybody. It was really overwhelming how many flu cases we had this year.
The other misconception is that if you have the flu or you have influenza illness, you don't need to get the shot. It's still important that you get the shot even if you've been sick because you can still get influenza more than one time in the season.
Is now the time to get the shot?
So, flu season more or less goes from September to March. So we start vaccinating in September, and we start seeing an uptick in cases, probably as Halloween passed and then Thanksgiving passed. So right after that, we start seeing all those cases start popping up.
So, I personally get it either the end of September or the beginning of October.
A lot of my patients are already getting it, and it makes me very happy when I come in and I get all these immunization notifications. It makes my heart full.
RESOURCES:
Get Ready for Flu Season 2025: What to Know
What ingredients are in the flu vaccine?
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