Influenza is tracked through the extensive and granular Weekly U.S. Influenza Surveillance Report (FluView). For emerging viruses, the CDC will often set up a disease-specific page as they did for MERS, SARS and Zika, whose U.S. cases are tracked here.
Where is the flu and where might it hit next? Reporters interested in a visualization of flu outbreaks and forecast for their particular region can check out the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health’s newly launched Influenza Observations and Forecast Map. Data for the map comes from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, the World Health Organization’s collaborating laboratory network, and Google searches. The site is funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Service’s Biological Advanced Research & Development Authority. More on the researchers involved in developing this model can be found here.
For journalists interested in a story about how how a hospital system might help the Centers for Disease Control with flu tracking, check out Houston Methodist hospitals’ flu-tracking website, launched in December 2018. Anyone who is interested can log in to the site to see flu epidemiology data collected from its eight hospitals. In the journal, Open Forum Infectious Disease, Houston Methodist researchers explain how they developed the flu tracking model to manage big jumps in flu cases. The site tracks influenza A and B – the most common flu viruses to infect humans – and viruses that can cause other types of severe respiratory diseases as well. The researchers noted that other hospital systems can use a similar model to prepare for flu outbreaks.
DoctorsReport.com relies on data drawn from the private health care claims database company, IQVIA.com. This sites allows reporters to look at illness data based on ZIP codes.