High Flu Level In Virginia: Season Off To Worrisome Start

VIRGINIA — 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, underscoring fears that hospitals in Virginia will be overwhelmed by a “tripledemic” of flu, the respiratory illness known as RSV and COVID-19.

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. Among 880,000 lab-confirmed 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; Virginia is in the high range, according to the CDC weekly surveillance report.

In the state, 7,279 flu cases were confirmed as of Wednesday, the CDC said.

In the weekly flu activity report, the Virginia health department said the most visits by age group were among children below 1 to age 4. Among this age group, 15 percent of all emergency department and urgent care visits in the week of Oct. 22 were for flu-like illness. About 10 percent of emergency department and urgent care visits were for flu-like illness were patients age 65 and older.

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.

On Monday, the Virginia Department of Health said emergency department and urgent care visits related to diagnosed RSV cases have quadrupled since September in Virginia. While emergency department and urgent care visits for diagnosed RSV were below 100 for the first few months of 2022, visits climbed from around 200 in late August to between 800 and 900 by late September and early October.

In Virginia, the positivity rate for COVID cases was 8.7 percent on Friday, according to the state dashboard. A total of 2,117,608 confirmed cases of the COVID have been recorded;,an increase of 1,548 in the past 24 hours.

A total of 22,189 Virginians have died from COVID; one child died from related multisystem inflammatory syndrome in the last 24 hours.

Official said 484 COVID patients are currently hospitalized, with 73 in ICU and 23 on a ventilator.

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.

In Virginia, no data for RSV is showing on the CDC site.

There are no inoculations against RSV, as there are for both the flu and COVID-19, but a couple of pharmaceutical companies are working to develop vaccines. Flu vaccines and COVID-19 vaccines in Virginia can be found at www.vaccinate.virginia.gov or www.vaccines.gov.

Related: RSV Activity Up In VA: 5 Things To Know About 'Tripledemic' Threat

“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.