Influenza-associated Hospitalizations and Deaths,

In 2005, Costa Rica maintained a database of persons hospitalized throughout the country’s public hospitals. Approximately 95% of all hospitalizations occur within this centralized health care system. This hospital database contains information on patients’ demographics, their first 6 ICD-10 coded diagnoses, and their survival. We used this information to determine the number of persons admitted to public hospitals during 2009–2012 and dis-charged with proxy diagnoses of severe acute respiratory infection (SARI) (ICD-10 code J9–18) (