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It's Lizzie Smith Rogers. Today, the flu. Cases are at their highest point in a decade.

Hospitalizations are up and it seems like everyone is sick.

Dr. Erica Prakasca, a pediatric infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins,

unpack some of the reasons why with Stephanie Desmond and tells her it's not too late to get vaccinated.

Let's listen.

Erica Prowaska, thanks so much for joining me.

Thank you for having me. It's great to be back.

So today, of course, I want to talk about the flu.

We're seeing lots of hospitalizations, lots of cases.

People are dying.

So why is it so bad right now?

So excellent question.

I think that in terms of how it's so bad, there's a couple different measures of how bad it is.

And you mentioned several of them, right?

One is the just sheer number of people who have influenza.

And this is the highest peak, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, since about 2015, 2016.

So it's definitely the most numbers we've seen in about a decade.

And in terms of severity of infections, yeah, we are seeing, unfortunately, a lot of very sick

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