How hard is the flu hitting Centre County?

You feel it in your chest.

It’s that deep, all-the-way-in-your-lungs cough, not just a tickle in your throat. The cough gives you a headache. You tense up and feel it stretch the muscles around your ribs, but all of that blends together with the bone-deep muscle pain and fatigue. You ping-pong between hot and cold.

You’ve got the flu. And you aren’t alone.

Influenza is hitting the U.S. hard in the 2017-18 season, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

“Flu seasons every year are bad so there’s never a mild flu season. This season is on that more severe side,” said Dan Jernigan, director of the influenza division in CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, in a recent conference call with media.

The agency is calling the disease “widespread” across the country.

“First, is with the geographic spread or where is flu happening, and I think the simplest way to describe it is that flu is everywhere in the U.S. right now. There’s lots of flu in lots of places,” Jernigan said.

In Pennsylvania, the numbers are high, too, also noted as widespread, with outbreaks or increases in at least half the state.

The Pennsylvania Department of Health puts documented, diagnosed cases across the commonwealth at 25,497. The worst county numbers come out of the Pittsburgh area, where Allegheny County has 4,134 cases. York County is second with 1,461 and Westmoreland — adjacent to Allegheny — has 1,335.

Centre County is not that bad. With 434 tested cases, it comes in at 21st place out of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties.

But looking at population, Allegheny is still in first place, but it doesn’t have 10 times the cases of Happy Valley. Instead, it is just about double, with 3.3 diagnosed cases per thousand people compared to Centre County’s 1.6 cases per thousand. And that’s just the people who got tested.

Pennsylvania has also had 47 deaths attributed to the flu so far this season, including a 21-year-old Latrobe man shortly after Christmas. Of those deaths, 15 were in the third week of January.

According to Marlene Stetson, director of infection prevention and control and Mount Nittany Medical Center, just because the flu season is well under way does not mean it is too late to minimize risks.

“The flu shot is always your best defense,” she said.

“Vaccination is our main tool to prevent influenza infection, and CDC recommends that vaccination efforts continue as long as influenza viruses are circulating. It about takes two weeks for protection from vaccination to set in, but as I said, we have a lot of flu season to get through still,” Jernigan said.

But shots aren’t the only way to cut risks. The hospital is a great place to go if you’re sick and want help, but people should think about their health before visiting.

“Because many of our patients have low resistance to infection, please use good judgment when planning a visit to the medical center if you are not feeling well,” Stetson said.

That might mean staying home, or it might mean paying attention to the hospital signage and respiratory hygiene stations with their stockpiles of masks and hand sanitizers to minimize risks.

According to Stetson, clean hands are incredibly important to controlling the spread of the disease.

“Because most viruses, including the flu, are picked up on the hands, children and adults alike can significantly lower the chance of getting sick by washing or sanitizing their hands often,” she said.

For healthy people, the American Red Cross is actually urging them to come out to events. Specifically, they would like to see you give blood.

Regina Booth Bratton, external communications manager, said a combination of severe winter weather and illness is impacting the supply of blood products. When people have the flu, they can’t donate blood, she said, making it all the more important for healthy individuals to fill that void.

This story was originally published January 23, 2018 at 9:45 PM with the headline "How hard is the flu hitting Centre County?."