CBS News – 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.
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“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 …