Hospitalizations

If you do not already have the number of flu hospitalizations or deaths for your country, you can check to see if those data have been reported by your national public health agency, the WHO Global Influenza Programme, or the WHO FluID platform. You may also enter your own estimates. If estimates are not already available for your populations of interest, guidance for generating estimates is available in WHO’s Manual for Estimating Disease Burden Associated With Seasonal Influenza.

In most instances, flu surveillance data are incomplete. Official figures often extrapolate from reported data to estimate the total number of cases, hospitalizations, and/or deaths for the total population or sub-populations or age groups of interest. These estimates inherently include a degree of uncertainty, depending on the volume and quality of the underlying data. A confidence interval (CI) is one tool for expressing that uncertainty, providing range of values that are expected to contain the true value (e.g., mean) a certain percentage of the time, commonly at the 90% or 95% level. If you choose to do so, you can provide 95% CIs for your data, and the Flu Tool will adjust the outputs accordingly.