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An early start to Canada’s flu season is hitting children hard, sending a flood of young patients into multiple pediatric hospitals as medical teams warn that emergency visits and admissions could keep climbing in the weeks ahead.
At CHEO, eastern Ontario’s children’s hospital in Ottawa, eight times more children tested positive for influenza in November compared with the same month in 2024, while double the number of children needed to be hospitalized. Most of those children hadn’t had a seasonal flu vaccine, according to CHEO’s emergency department team.
The hospital saw “unprecedented” numbers on Monday, with close to 300 young patients coming through the emergency department in a single day, marking a roughly 20 per cent increase from last year, CHEO’s vice-president of acute care services, Karen Macauley, told CBC News.
Those higher volumes are already putting strain on the hospital’s limited capacity and leading staff to rely on overflow spaces for patient care, Macauley said, while public health forecasting suggests the worst is yet to come, with a peak expected later in December.
Other children’s hospitals in Ontario and Quebec are seeing similar spikes in patients and bracing for a busy stretch ahead.
Dr. Harley Eisman, medical director of the division of pediatric emergency medicine at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, said the hospital’s emergency department was “pretty quiet” up until mid-November but is now seeing more than 200 patients a day, mirroring busy cold and flu seasons of years’ past.
“I worked last night, and we were seeing 12 to 15 new patients register an hour, which is certainly above our hourly capacity,” he told CBC News on Thursday morning.
Many of those patients are now testing positive for influenza A, Eisman said.
The St. Joseph’s Health Centre Just for Kids Clinic is also seeing more children with influenza-like illnesses, though the Toronto facility couldn’t give an exact count as those who are well enough to go home don’t end up being tested.
“They come in with runny nose, cough, prolonged fevers and sometimes even vomiting and diarrhea,” said Dr. Anne Wormsbecker, the clinic’s chief of pediatrics. “With the winter holidays coming up, now is a great time to book appointments for flu vaccines for the whole family, if you haven’t done so already.”
Dr. Christopher Labos, an epidemiologist and cardiologist, joins CBC News to discuss the upcoming flu season in Canada.
8% jump in positive flu tests at children’s hospitals
Country-wide, positive tests for influenza A at pediatric hospitals jumped eight per cent from mid to late November — rising from 35 per cent of tests taken during the week of Nov. 16 to 43 per cent during the week of Nov. 23.
The flu is now showing up far more often among kids and teens than other respiratory bugs, according to the figures from the Surveillance Program for the Rapid Identification and Tracking of Infectious Diseases in Kids, which tracks real-time trends at more than a dozen Canadian pediatric hospital sites in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland.
Medical experts have been bracing for this to be a brutal flu season, given the global spread of an H3N2 influenza A strain that’s typically linked to higher hospitalizations — which also gained recent mutations that may make it a tougher foe for this season’s flu shot.
H3N2 is now the most-reported subtype across Canada, the latest federal figures show. Public health data also shows more than eight per cent of influenza tests country-wide are now coming back positive, with a rise in cases reported across all age groups.
Flu surges could spread across Canada in weeks ahead
Despite the possibility of a “slight mismatch” between this year’s vaccine and the latest H3N2 strain, Dr. Srinivas Murthy, a researcher and pediatric intensive care physician at B.C. Children’s Hospital, said the shot likely offers a substantial amount of protection against serious illness from the flu.
“People hear that, ‘Oh, it’s not a good match this year, therefore we shouldn’t get vaccinated.’ That’s not the right message,” he said. “It’s really that the vaccine, regardless, will [help prevent] severe disease, which is what we all end up caring about the most.”
Murthy said colleagues at his own hospital in Vancouver aren’t yet seeing a substantial surge in children with influenza, but he stressed that could change.
“The fact that if we’re seeing more surges in one part of the country, it’s likely that the rest of the country will start to see those surges in the next few weeks,” Murthy said.
Health officials in other Northern Hemisphere nations are bracing for rising flu cases as well.
Last month, U.K. health officials warned that this is shaping up to be a particularly bad flu season while the latest figures from Scotland show flu cases across the country recently jumped by 45 per cent in one week.
U.S. medical experts are also watching the fast and early spread of the H3N2 strain, which is expected to hit older adults hardest as flu season progresses.
