Flu, COVID & RSV: Here's The Situation In Washington

YOUR STATE — Seasonal influenza cases are higher in many states than they’ve been at this time of the year in more than a decade, federal health officials said Friday, underscoring fears that hospitals this winter could 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 of the country, and is picking up along the Atlantic coast.

In the Pacific Northwest, flu activity is minimal so far, according to the CDC weekly surveillance report. However, infections are beginning to rise in Washington, and the state recently reported its first two flu deaths of the season. The state Department of Health on Thursday urged residents to consider getting their flu shots, along with the updated omicron-focused COVID-19 boosters.

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 Washington, DOH officials said COVID-19 cases have largely kept on a downward trend since mid-summer, apart from a "small bump" recorded last month, but activity remains in the moderate to substantial range across most of the state. They worry waning immunity, new subvariants and more people gathering indoors over the colder months could lend to another surge in the weeks to come.

"We don't have a way of predicting COVID-19 activity, but we need to prepare for the likelihood of another wave of COVID-19 this winter," said Dr. Tao Kwan-Gett, the state's chief science officer. "In fact, some European countries have seen a rise in cases in the last few weeks, and the same could happen here in the United States."

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.

That's true in Washington, too.

"Hospitals are already at high capacity and very stressed," Kwan-Gett said. "We're hearing that most pediatric sites, such as Seattle Children's hospital and Mary Bridge Children's Hospital are seeing record-high emergency department volumes due to RSV and other respiratory viruses."

According to The Seattle Times, testing at UW Medicine is detecting up to 200 percent more RSV cases than the same time last year. Cases in young children and infants, who are more at risk, have led to overwhelmed pediatric emergency departments, with double the number of patients than usual for October at Seattle Children's, including 20 to 30 RSV cases per day.

“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.