Further study is needed to determine whether population averages could reflect the clinical intensity of an influenza season, once it was determined that no assay-related sequence drift had occurred, on the theory that more severely ill the patients might seek medical care earlier in the course of their illness. Hence higher titers could be a reflection of patients being tested earlier when their titers were higher [12–16]. As noted above, the subtype genes of both the H3N2 and H1N1 strains have a perfect sequence match with their respective subtype capture and signal probes and a single bp mismatch in both forward and reverse primers, but since each subtype assay has different target sequences, average nAMPs cannot be compared.