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Emergency room visits with influenza are now “very high” nationwide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday, in this week’s update on the winter respiratory virus season.
This season’s wave of flu cases is arriving later than it has in the past two years. After the COVID-19 pandemic, annual waves of influenza during the colder months increased weeks earlier than they had during many pre-pandemic seasons.
This year, flu trends look to be closely in line with the 2019 to 2020 season, which also reached peak levels around the New Year.
Some of the highest levels of influenza are now in Western states, several of which have already topped the peaks recorded during the worst of last winter’s flu season.
In Oregon, the CDC’s data show 8.4% of emergency room visits involved flu at the end of December. This is now more than three times higher than the peak reached last season.
“You can see that in Dec. 2022, we also had a very large spike in flu cases, but this year has been significantly higher than last year,” said Sara Hottman, a spokesperson for Oregon Health & Science University Hospital, in an email.
According to figures shared by Hottman for the hospital and the other health care facilities in their system, 1,101 cases of influenza were treated in November and December of 2024, up from 251 cases during the same months in 2023.
Daily tallies of flu patients now rank as among the highest in recent years at the hospital, second only to a record surge during the 2022 to 2023 season.
“In 2022, the combination of RSV, flu and COVID led to a public health emergency and crisis standards of care among hospitals in the region. We have not experienced that, and do not currently expect to, this year,” said Hottman.
A “tripledemic” is also unlikely to repeat again this year nationwide, experts estimate. This season’s influenza wave comes as COVID-19 levels are only now beginning to accelerate in several parts of the country, weeks later than in some previous years.
Updated CDC modeling published over Christmas estimated that this winter’s COVID-19 wave is also not expected to be as large as some previous winter surges, in part given the lack so far of a “new immune-escape variant” of the virus.
The CDC last estimated that most COVID infections are from the XEC variant, which officials have said is closely related to previous strains. The LP.8.1 strain that variant trackers have been closely monitoring still made up less than 1 in 10 cases.
The latest data from CDC’s wastewater surveillance suggests that COVID-19 levels have only recently crossed from “moderate” to “high” levels nationwide.
Levels of the virus in wastewater are worst across the Midwest, though they remain far below the peaks seen during last winter’s wave.
In the Midwest, Indiana ranks as the state with the largest share of emergency room visits with COVID-19, though they remain a fraction of influenza visits and below last winter’s peak.
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