Hamilton’s hospital flu cases at ‘unprecedented’ low levels

While the number of COVID-19 infections continues to worry public health officials, there's a small silver lining that's kept a bad situation from being even worse - seasonal influenza cases have almost disappeared in Hamilton so far this winter.

I can't recall admitting anyone in the last month with influenza," said Dr. Kuldeep Sidhu, chief of emergency medicine for Hamilton Health Sciences. We're seeing barely any cases of influenza."

The story is the same for St. Joseph's Healthcare.

We have had zero flu cases reported from our lab - zero," said Dr. Zain Chagla, an infectious diseases specialist and medical director of infection control at St. Joe's in Hamilton. It's incredible. This is typically when we see the surge.

I think they ran about 400 samples last week and there was zero," Chagla added. I looked at the same report from about a year ago - there were about 800 specimens processed and there were a good 150 flu cases at that point.

This is unprecedented for this time of year to be seeing no flu activity."

Nationally, Sidhu said, swab testing of hospital and ER patients would normally detect influenza in about 22 per cent of all cases at this time of year. But in the past week, the rate of flu detections was down to about 0.01 per cent, or one in 10,000 people.

We were anticipating both high flu numbers as well as high COVID numbers but luckily that didn't come to pass," Sidhu said. Everything that we do to avoid COVID, we're basically doing to avoid influenza."

Aside from the obvious public health measures that have been adopted - masking, physical and social distancing, regular handwashing - there was also an aggressive flu vaccination campaign in the fall.

Chagla said the typical uptake for the flu vaccine is around 30 per cent of the population but he expects that proportion may have at least doubled this flu season.

On top of that, there has been more vigilance in flu prevention measures in long-term care homes, plus the fact that people are staying at home and not travelling nearly as much this winter, especially to warmer climates where the influenza virus stays active all year long.

Influenza doesn't magically appear in Canada every winter," Chagla said. It's imported from places where influenza is endemic throughout the year, particularly the tropical regions.

With travel policies and quarantine and all that stuff, we're probably limiting the amount of influenza coming into the country to even set off the typical outbreak that we see."

Steve Buist is a Hamilton-based investigative reporter at The Spectator. Reach him via email: sbuist@thespec.com