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

ILLINOIS — 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 across the country and in Illinois 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.

Flu activity throughout Illinois is low, according to the CDC weekly surveillance report. The Illinois Department of Public Health said in its weekly report that just 3.3 percent of tests for the flu came back positive over the past week.

State health officials reported 177 positive cases of the flu across the state out of 5,341 people who were tested for the virus.

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.

In Illinois, five counties are reported to be in the high COVID-19 community category as of Friday. Ford, Ogle Pike, Stephenson, and Vermillion counties have registered as being high concentrations of the virus while the entire greater Chicago area reported as being in the low community group, health officials said. There are 33 counties across Illinois that are in the medium category as health officials reported seeing an uptick in COVID-19 cases over the past week.

Residents of counties in the high category are encouraged to take steps toward protecting themselves against the virus, including wearing masks in indoor settings. Illinois reported 13,642 new COVID cases in the last week, along with 67 deaths, which was an increase in both cases and deaths, up from 11,995 cases and 43 deaths last week.

“As the weather is getting colder and Halloween is nearly upon us, Illinois and much of the nation are seeing a notable increase in individuals getting sick from respiratory viruses, including the flu, RSV, and once again COVID-19,” IDPH Director Dr. Sameer Vohra said in a statement.

“This uptick makes it critically important for everyone to use the tools that are available to protect yourself and your family. Vaccines remain the most powerful tool to prevent serious illness. If you have not gotten the COVID-19 booster and a flu shot for yourself and your eligible children, now is a great time."

Despite the uptick in cases, only 129 people across Illinois are hospitalized with COVID-19 as of Friday with 48 of those patients being on ventilators, according to the department of health.

The CDC report comes as children’s hospitals across the country are seeing a rise in RSV cases. Cases of the 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 Illinois, health officials reported this week that they expect to see a spike in the number of children experiencing respiratory issues. Chicago hospital officials and those across from neighboring counties saying they are bracing for what could be a difficult stretch of children, some as young as 6 months and older, experiencing issues with RSV.

In Illinois, there were 3.333 positive tests detected by antigen testing over the past five weeks while PCR tests detected 91.000 positive cases in children across Illinois, according to data provided by the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention.

“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, (but) 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.