EVERETT — After a slow start to the season, influenza has hit Snohomish County hard since 2025 began, becoming one of the worst flu seasons in years.
There’s also little hope for quick relief. Hospitalization rates in the county are at the highest since the 2018-19 season and show no signs of slowing down soon, health officials said. The increased rates of hospitalization, along with required precautionary testing to prevent the spread of avian flu, has strained the resources of local hospitals.
“Flu activity is still continuing at very high levels and has been very high for several weeks now,” the Snohomish County Health Officer, Dr. James Lewis, said Tuesday. “There’s not really a sign that it’s slowing down at the moment, so it could certainly get to the point where this could be one of the most severe flu seasons we’ve seen in a decade or more. It’s just too early to tell.”
Most people who get the flu will recover within a few days. But people with risk factors — being older than 65, younger than two, having asthma, lung diseases, heart diseases or other preexisting conditions — may suffer more severe illness due to influenza.
Currently, 7.8% of emergency department visits are influenza-related, according to Snohomish County Health Department statistics. Four hundred and four people have been hospitalized due to the flu as of Feb. 22. In the first three weeks of February, seven schools reported having more than 10% of students absent because of flu-related illnesses.
The flu has killed 16 people throughout Snohomish County so far this season. Most of them were over 65 years old, health department data shows. It’s the highest flu death toll since the 2018-19 season.
The reasons for the severity of this year’s flu season are unclear, Dr. Lewis said Tuesday. At this point in the last two years, the flu season was already coming to an end.
One contributing factor, however, is likely the lower-than-average rates of flu vaccination in Puget Sound region. Only 29.1% of eligible people in the Snohomish County have received a reported flu vaccine this season, state data shows.
“It’s likely higher than that because not every flu vaccine that gets administered gets reported into the state system … But in the past, we’ve certainly seen this number higher in previous years,” Dr. Lewis said.
In the past three flu seasons, vaccination rates in the county have been higher, with 33.8% of people in Snohomish County receiving a reported flu shot between 2021 and 2022, and 34.4% of people receiving a reported shot between 2022 and 2023. Those numbers decreased during the 2023-2024 flu season, with a reported vaccination rate of 31.9% throughout the county.
Getting vaccinated can help prevent potentially dangerous side effects from the flu and is especially important for people with an increased risk of complications from influenza.
The increased number of flu cases places additional strain on local hospitals as well, said Dr. George Diaz, the division chief of medicine at Providence Regional Medical Center Everett. He is also an expert on infectious diseases.
“There’s a lot of issues with this in terms of impact to the hospital,” Dr. Diaz said. “The more people that have flu in the community, the more they’re going to come into the hospital, be seen in the ER, fill up the ER and fill up hospital beds.”
Because of the recent rise in H5N1 across the country — known as bird flu or avian flu — hospitals must also test for the disease if seasonal flu tests come back negative.
“All of these people that come into the hospital with flu end up getting additional testing because we have to test and make sure they don’t have avian flu,” Dr. Diaz said. “That’s another additional resource expenditure because people, by and large, are coming with just severe seasonal flu.”
If a seasonal flu test comes back negative for a patient, hospitals also isolate the person as a precaution to prevent the possible spread of avian flu.
However, no H5N1 cases have been reported in humans yet in Snohomish County, and any negative tests of seasonal flu in flu patients so far have been false negatives, Dr. Diaz said.
Only a few isolated cases of avian flu have been reported in humans across the country. Human-to-human transmission of the disease has also not been reported in the United States — most cases were among people who came in close contact with infected animals.
To prevent the spread of the flu, health officials recommend washing hands frequently, getting vaccinated, wearing masks when in large crowds and staying home if you get sick. Masking is also recommended for those with risk factors.
To get a vaccine, visit vaccines.gov.
Will Geschke: 425-339-3443; william.geschke@heraldnet.com; X: @willgeschke.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
