Some good news in Chatham-Kent.
The number of confirmed cases of influenza is down.
Officials with the Chatham-Kent Health Unit say only 12 cases of the flu have been confirmed so far this season. That’s 50 per cent lower than last year.
Health officials do add however, it could be not that all cases are reported, nor do the patients need hospitalization.
Many Ontario communities, like Windsor-Essex, are reporting more children are coming down with the dreaded winter bug compared to adults.
In fact, the Public Health Agency of Canada reports the number of children admitted to hospital for the flu this season is more than twice as high as it was at this time last year.
It’s also more than three times as high as it was at this point in the 2016-2017 flu season.
Experts say it's because the H1N1 flu strain is back.
But that is not the case in Chatham-Kent, where officials say the majority of cases are middle-aged adults.
This year's flu season has a far different profile than last year's: it began earlier and the predominant circulating A strain is H1N1, the viral type that caused the pandemic in 2009-2010 but hasn't made much of an appearance for the last few years.
Those previous seasons were dominated by H3N2, an influenza A strain that is particularly hard on older adults and which typically carries a higher risk of complications like pneumonia that can lead to hospitalization or death, said Dr. Danuta Skowronski, epidemiology lead of influenza and emerging respiratory pathogens at the BC Centre for Disease Control.
As of Dec. 29, the most recent data available from the Public Health Agency of Canada shows there were 13,796 laboratory-confirmed influenza cases across the country, with the provinces and territories reporting 1,046 hospitalizations and 24 deaths. Most cases occurred in people under age 65.
Last season at that point, 11,275 cases of lab-confirmed flu had been reported.
Since September, PHAC says 414 children under age 16 have been hospitalized for flu, with the highest estimated rate of admission among kids under five years of age. That's more than double the 195 logged during the same period in 2017.
Seventy-one of those kids had to be admitted to the ICU. At least one death has been documented by the network of 12 pediatric hospitals across the country that reports to PHAC, but for privacy reasons the agency does not release the exact number, saying only that there have been fewer than five.
Ontario got off to slower start to the season compared to Alberta, for instance, which began getting hit with the respiratory illness in late October, early November.
"We're really just now getting into our flu season," said Dr. Michelle Murti of Public Health Ontario, noting that the proportion of tests on people with respiratory bugs that came back positive for influenza had doubled to 16 per cent in the week ending Dec. 29, compared to eight per cent the week before.
"So we're probably on track to coming up to more of our peak activity in the next couple of weeks or so."
Regardless, health officials still encourage people to get the flu shot since flu season can last until May.
