School Holds Vigil For Gabriella Chabot, Teen Killed By Flu

Amid the grip of the country's worst influenza outbreak since 2009, several fatal cases of healthy people contracting the flu illustrate the power of this year's particularly deadly influenza strain. The active flu strains in the 2017-18 flu season have proven particularly deadly, with Americans dying at a higher rate than normal across the contiguous U.S.

For example, 14-year-old Gabriella Chabot passed away Thursday from the flu. The Thousand Oaks, California teen’s death shook the all-girls Catholic school she attended, as La Reina Middle/High School said it would make grief counselors available to students in the coming weeks.

Chabot would have turned 15 a week after she died. The school held a vigil Friday attended by students and other community members, some of which can be seen in a CBS Los Angeles news segment about Chabot’s death.

Doctors have attributed the unusually high amount of death this flu season to the stubborn, powerful H3N2 strain. Even widely available flu vaccines are not working on some of the strains that have gone around in the past few months, leading to what some are calling the worst flu outbreak since the 2009 swine flu incident.

New CDC data quantified the epidemic, according to Fortune. In the third week of 2018 alone, more than 4,000 Americans died from the flu, which accounted for 10 percent of total deaths in the U.S. that week. According to the CDC, 63 of the deaths this flu season have been children.