Children’s hospitals in Canada are flooded with flu patients as doctors urge families to get vaccinated

The early start of flu season in Canada is hitting children hard, leading to an influx of young patients at many pediatric hospitals as medical teams warn that emergency visits and admissions could continue to rise in the coming weeks.

At CHEO, the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario in Ottawa, eight times more children tested positive for influenza in November than in the same month in 2024, while there were twice as many children requiring hospitalization. According to CHEO’s emergency department team, most of those children had not received the seasonal flu vaccine.

The hospital saw “unprecedented” numbers on Monday, with nearly 300 young patients coming to the emergency department in a single day, which represents an increase of about 20 per cent over last year, Karen Macaulay, CHEO’s vice-president of acute care services, told CBC News.

Those high volumes are already putting a strain on limited hospital capacity, Macaulay said, and staff are having to rely on overflowing spaces for patient care, while public health FForecasts suggest the worst is yet to come, with the peak expected to occur in late December.

Other children’s hospitals in Ontario and Quebec are seeing similar increases in patient numbers and are bracing for busy times ahead.

Dr. Harley Eiseman, medical director of the department of pediatric emergency medicine at Montreal Children’s Hospital, said the hospital’s emergency department was “pretty quiet” until mid-November, but is now seeing more than 200 patients a day, mirroring the busy cold and flu seasons of past years.

“I worked last night, and we were seeing 12 to 15 new patients being registered an hour, which is definitely above our hourly capacity,” he told CBC News on Thursday morning.

Many of those patients are now testing positive for influenza A, Eiseman said.

St. Joseph’s Health Center Just for Kids clinic is also seeing more children with influenza-like illnesses, though the Toronto facility can’t give an accurate count because those who are healthy enough to go home aren’t tested.

“They come with a runny nose, cough, prolonged fever and sometimes even vomiting and diarrhea,” said Dr. Anne Wormsbecker, the clinic’s chief of pediatrics. “With the winter holidays approaching, now is a great time to book appointments for flu vaccines for the whole family, if you haven’t already done so.”

8% jump in positive flu tests in children’s hospitals

Nationwide, positive tests for influenza A in pediatric hospitals increased by eight percent from mid to late November – from 35 percent of tests conducted during the week of November 16 to 43 percent during the week of November 23.

Flu is now appearing more frequently in children and teens than other respiratory bugs. according to statistics From the Surveillance Program for Rapid Identification and Tracking of Infectious Diseases in Children, 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.

Given the global spread of H3N2 influenza, medical experts are bracing for what could be a brutal flu season, typically associated with high hospitalizations — which also has a recent mutation that could make it a tougher foe. For this season’s flu shot,

H3N2 now most commonly reported subtype across Canada, latest Federal data shows. Public health data also shows that more than eight percent of influenza tests nationwide are now coming back positive, with reported cases increasing across all age groups.

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Flu outbreak could spread across Canada in coming weeks

Despite the possibility of a “minor mismatch” between this year’s vaccine and the latest H3N2 strain, Dr. Srinivas Murthy, a researcher and pediatric intensive care physician at BC Children’s Hospital, said the shot likely offers a better prognosis. Adequate protection against serious illness caused by flu,

“People hear that, ‘Oh, it’s not a good match this year, so we shouldn’t get the vaccine.’ This is not the right message,” he said. “It’s really that the vaccine, no matter what it is, will help prevent serious disease, which is what we all care about most.”

Murthy said colleagues at his own hospital in Vancouver are not yet seeing a substantial increase in children with influenza, but he stressed that could change.

“The truth is that if we are seeing a higher surge in one part of the country, it is likely that the rest of the country will also start seeing this surge in the next few weeks,” Murthy said.

Health officials in other countries in the Northern Hemisphere are also bracing for rising cases of flu.

Last month, UK health officials warned that it was shaping up to be a particularly bad flu season, while the latest data from Scotland showed a recent rise in flu cases across the country. 45 percent in a week,

American medical expert Also tracking the rapid and early spread of the H3N2 strainOlder adults are likely to be most affected as flu season progresses.