The number of flu outbreaks in Minnesota schools dropped by more than half last week, and hospitalized cases dipped nearly 20 percent, raising the possibility that the H1N1 epidemic may be on the retreat, state health officials said Wednesday.
"I am optimistic that we have peaked," said Dr. Ruth Lynfield, Minnesota's state epidemiologist, who has been tracking the outbreak since April. "But we need several weeks of data to know for sure."
The encouraging signs emerged even as the Health Department announced four more flu-related deaths and the first two confirmed outbreaks in Minnesota nursing homes.
In the final week of October, 137 schools reported outbreaks of flu-like illness, down from 288 the week before, according to the Health Department. Those are schools where more than 5 percent of students were out sick, or more than three elementary-school children were absent from the same class.
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Meanwhile, 182 people were hospitalized with confirmed cases of H1N1 last week, compared to 225 the week before.
The Health Department also tracks flu-like illness at 25 "sentinel" clinics around the state. Last week, only 3.5 percent of patients at those clinics had flu-like symptoms, down from 7.5 percent the week before and a high of 12.6 percent in mid-October.
"We certainly do have a number of indicators that influenza-like activity throughout the state is going down," Lynfield said.
Yet she and John Linc Stine, an assistant health commissioner, cautioned against reading too much into seven days of numbers. "While it offers some positive signs that we may have seen a peak, we don't know that right now," Stine said.