Many Utahns showing up in the state’s emergency rooms are having a hard time breathing, coughing, and fighting a stuffy nose and fever. Flu cases in Utah may have come late in the season compared to other states, but they are spiking, with many patients experiencing severe symptoms.

From October to December 21, the Utah Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) tracked 316 influenza-associated hospitalizations. That number jumped to 539 when the state added data from the week of December 22-28, elevating this flu season to moderate severity.

But that doesn’t account for all cases that health care professionals are seeing. In the Bear River, Salt Lake County and Weber-Morgan areas, current influenza-like illnesses — which include symptoms like fever, and a cough, and/or sore throat, are high, according to DHHS.

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“Sometimes it’s not officially diagnosed as flu in the emergency room, but we can tell that they have symptoms that are consistent with it, or that they’re complaining of something that sounds a lot like flu,” Dr. Leisha Nolen, the state epidemiologist said on Thursday.

According to DHHS, during the flu season that started in October, Salt Lake and Utah counties, the two most populous jurisdictions in the state, experienced the highest counts of hospitalizations — 261 and 93, respectively.

Compared to the years starting in 2019, this falls on middle ground, Nolen said. By this time of year in the 2022-2023 season, there were 1,176 cases. During the COVID-19 pandemic years, there were fewer cases registered than the state is seeing now.

“It certainly is going up pretty fast, which means that we probably should expect to have quite a few more cases before we get through this season,” Nolen said. “But we aren’t having a severe year at this point.”

Some of the most vulnerable people to flu-associated hospitalizations are people over 65 years old. Their statewide case count is about 244 so far this season, according to DHHS data. Also up are hospital visits for those who have underlying health conditions, Nolen said.

“People who have to be hospitalized are people, usually, who get so sick that they have a hard time breathing and that they have a hard time keeping all that oxygen going around their body, and so they had to go into the hospital to keep that going,” she said.

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Vaccines can keep people from getting severely sick, Nolen said, so there’s a possibility that those affected haven’t received their shots this year, or don’t have access to health care.

A majority of the cases are part of the influenza A strain. However, Nolen explained that whether the virus is A or B doesn’t matter much in the community.

“It means we get sick. It is more of a genetic difference between these two viruses, and they do tend to circulate kind of differently,” she said. However, the strain won’t make a big difference to patients, since they cause very similar illnesses, and they are both spread in the same ways.

The viruses are spread from person to person with exposure to those who are sick, so Nolen recommends “doing the things your mom taught you,” including washing your hands, using hand sanitizer, covering your face, staying home if you are ill, getting some good sleep and updating your flu vaccine.

Though cases of what’s commonly referred to as the bird flu are popping up across the country, there aren’t any human cases in Utah, Nolen said.

“That has happened over and over again for the last few years, where we’ll get these sort of sporadic cases of severe infection in one or two people with the bird flu,” she said. “Right now, it doesn’t seem to be doing that very often at all, and it happily is not spreading human to human.”

Utah News Dispatch is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Utah News Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor McKenzie Romero for questions: info@utahnewsdispatch.com.