Flu Arrives Early, Off To Worrisome Start: The Situation In Michigan

MICHIGAN — As Michiganders prepare for their first winter in two years without masks, doctors are urging people to get vaccinated against the flu as seasonal influenza cases are higher than they’ve been at this time of the year in more than a decade, federal health officials said Friday.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned the flu season, which runs between October and May and normally peaks in December and January, has arrived unusually early and hard, prompting concerns that hospitals in Michigan will be overwhelmed by a “tripledemic” of flu, the respiratory illness known as RSV and COVID-19.

Among 880,000 lab-confirmed flu cases so far this season, 6,900 people have been hospitalized and 360 people, including one child, have died.

Flu activity is the highest in the South and Southeast, and is picking up along the Atlantic coast.

Like most of the Midwest, Michigan is seeing low to minimal levels of flu activity, according to the CDC weekly surveillance report.

As of the week ending Oct. 15, Michigan saw 13 positive flu cases, according to the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. Michigan's goal is to vaccinate four million against the flu. For the week ending Oct. 15, 1.2 million doses have been administered across the state.

Flu practically vanished over the past couple of years as people wore face masks and stayed out of crowded places to avoid COVID-19, which has killed more than 1 million people since early 2020. In the past week, 265,893 people in the United States have tested positive and 19,454 were hospitalized with COVID-19.

For the week ending Oct. 26, Michigan saw 12,167 weekly COVID-19 cases with 158 deaths, according to the CDC.

The CDC report comes as children’s hospitals across the country are seeing a rise in RSV cases. Cases of respiratory syncytial virus, as the common childhood illness is officially known, also plummeted during the first two years of the pandemic, but doctors now report an alarming increase in what is normally a fall and winter virus.

RSV cases are spreading across Michigan, particularly in the southeastern corner of the state where health officials have reported high levels. State health officials have also reported an uptick to modern levels in the central portion of the state.

“The data are ominous,” William Schaffner, medical director for the nonprofit National Foundation for Infectious Diseases and a professor of infectious diseases at that Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, told The Washington Post.

“Not only is flu early, it also looks very severe,” he said. “This is not just a preview of coming attractions. We’re already starting to see this movie. I would call it a scary movie.”

A couple of things are compounding the problem. Flu, COVID-19 and RSV all have similar symptoms, making laboratory tests the only way to erase doubt about which disease should be treated. Also, less than a quarter of Americans have gotten flu shots, according to CDC data.

“That makes me doubly worried,” Schaffner told The Post. The high burden of flu “certainly looks like the start of what could be the worst flu season in 13 years.”

He and other medical officials worry influenza numbers could rival the H1N1 swine flu pandemic of 2009, when 60.8 million people were sickened, including nearly 12,500 who died.