What happened to the flu season?

Doctors seeing less influenza, more colds

Several weeks into 2022 and Florida’s flu season appears to be nearly non-existent.

For the first three weeks of the new year, typically the height of the season, flu has been at low levels across the state.

In South Florida’s tri-county area, influenza activity actually has declined each week in January and is below the previous three-season level, Florida’s weekly Flu Review shows.

Doctors and nurse practitioners throughout South Florida attribute fewer cases of flu to multiple factors, and don’t expect to see a repeat of the horrid flu season the state endured in early 2020 just as COVID was arriving.

“I think the flu has been overshadowed by the prevalence of COVID,” said Dr. Carla McWilliams, chair of the infectious disease department at Cleveland Clinic Florida. “Flu season varies from year to year in terms of when it peaks in Florida, but over the last four to five weeks we’ve seen little activity.”

Typically, flu season in Florida runs from November to April but often peaks in February. In contrast, by January of 2020, doctors already were reporting a spike in people with fatigue who were testing positive for Type A flu, the most common strain early in the flu season.

This year, omicron’s surge appears to have curbed some of the spread as Floridians reacted with an increase in mask-wearing and handwashing along with more people isolated with COVID or exposure to it.

The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), which tracks influenza activity in each state, considers several factors in determining Florida’s low level: the number of overall patients who report respiratory illnesses, the number of longterm care facilities with at least one case of the flu, the share of flu tests that come back positive and the number of flu patients admitted to hospitals.

Since early December, the share of flu tests in Florida that have come back positive has fallen from 28% to 1%, according to the Florida Flu Review.

So while adult respiratory illnesses and flu have declined, “we are still seeing young children getting respiratory illnesses and that’s expected because they are less capable of performing the same types of precautions as adults,” McWilliams said.

At Holy Cross Urgent Care, Dr. Zynab Hassan said her two South Florida clinics had begun to see an increase in people testing positive for the flu just as delta receded. “Once omicron arrived it overpowered influenza,” said Hassan, medical director.

Now her clinics are seeing more patients with colds, bronchitis and strep.

“Usually with colds, you will see sniffles and runny noses,” Hassan said. “When you start looking at the flu or COVID, that’s when the headaches, body aches, fever and chills come in. We rule out flu and COVID with testing and then pretty much try to treat the symptoms.”

As flu season approached late in 2021, scientists expressed concern that people could catch flu and coronavirus at the same time, calling it “flurona.” Hassan said her clinics have seen only a few cases of flurona. “Those people are sicker longer,” she said.

Even with fewer flu cases this year, about 1,500 patients are in U.S. hospitals with laboratory-confirmed influenza. The most at risk, according to CDC hospitalization data, are people over age 65. If the flu is confirmed early, antiviral treatments can help make symptoms less severe and shorten recovery time.