Did you hear about the 2017-2018 U.S. flu season? How about the 2017-18 flu season overwhelming the hospitals and creating bed and ICU bed shortages? Neither did I, but it was the worst flu season in recent years. During the 2017-2018 flu season the CDC’s preliminary estimate is that 810,000 patients were hospitalized.  It is still a preliminary estimate, so that the upper range of uncertainty is 1.4 million hospitalizations due to the flu during the 2017-2018 season. That flu season also had the highest peak hospitalizations in recent years.    That hospitalization peak was the highest in recent years ran from the last week of December through the third or fourth week of January.  Based on numbers from graphs at Advisory.com, one can estimate that in the last week of December 2017, 29,430 people were hospitalized due to the flu.  The first week of January the estimated number of people hospitalized peaked at 33,354. The next week, the second...(Read Full Article)