Alberta battling high number of flu cases

An Alberta doctor says this year’s flu season will be worse than previous years, with low vaccination rates and a high number of cases.

The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) declared a flu epidemic Tuesday as cases surge across the country.

Dr. Christopher Mody, infectious diseases expert at the University of Calgary, says Alberta is not far behind provinces like Ontario that are dealing with skyrocketing cases of influenza, COVID-19, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

Mody says the respiratory illness season started much sooner than anticipated this year.

“Compared to 2020, it comes about three weeks earlier, compared to 2019, it’s about six weeks earlier, so we’re already seeing this number of cases at the same level between three to six weeks earlier than usual,” Mody said. “That’s a big deal.”

He adds there are currently around 900 reported cases of the flu in the province as well as 146 people hospitalized because of the virus. However, the true number of people who are sick is likely much higher.

“Surveillance for influenza, similar to COVID, is poor, in that we miss a lot of cases,” he said. “So there’s a lot of people that develop flu, stay home, do all the appropriate things, don’t get tested and we don’t know whether they have the disease. All we know is the people that get tested.”

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Mody says we’re likely going to see more cases of the flu this year than in previous years, and flu vaccine uptake is low.

“Currently 15 per cent of Albertans have received the vaccine for flu, that compares to 37 per cent in 2020 to 2021,” he said. “We’re running at a third to a half of what we normally run in terms of vaccinations. The epidemic promises to involve more people, it promises to be earlier, and it promises to be more severe in that less people are vaccinated.”

Mody says the solution to the problem is getting as many people vaccinated against the flu as possible. He adds at some pharmacies, you can get your flu shot at the same appointment when you get your COVID-19 shot.

PHAC says the national flu test positivity rate nearly doubled from the last week of October to the first week of November.

It says the week of Oct. 30 to Nov. 5 saw a test positivity rate of 11.7 per cent, compared to 6.3 per cent the previous week.

The agency’s FluWatch report says Canada has now entered a flu epidemic, which is declared most years after the threshold of a 5 per cent positivity rate is surpassed.

But it says influenza levels are higher than would have been expected when compared to pre-pandemic years. COVID-19 restrictions drastically reduced the spread of the flu in 2020 and 2021.

The health-care system is dealing with a triple threat of respiratory viruses, including COVID-19 and higher-than-normal levels of influenza and respiratory syncytial virus.

–With files from Todd Kaufmann