Flu Arrives Early With Worrisome Start: The Situation In Wisconsin

WISCONSIN — While much of the country is seeing a surge of seasonal influenza cases, federal health officials said Friday, underscoring fears that hospitals may be up against a “tripledemic” of respiratory illnesses, much of the Midwest remains at a low activity level.

Flu activity is at its highest in the South and Southeast and is picking up along the Atlantic coast. With that, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that the flu season has arrived unusually early and hard.

Flu activity throughout the Midwest and Wisconsin remains minimal to low, according to the CDC weekly surveillance report. In addition, over 1 million people in Wisconsin are now vaccinated for the flu so far this season, according to the state Department of Health Services.

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.

Over 15,000 Wisconsinites died because of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. Over 1.8 million people in the state have contracted the virus.

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.

Wisconsin is also seeing an increased presence of RSV, causing an influx of children checking into hospitals with respiratory issues.

RELATED: RSV Cases In WI: 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.