SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — It’s no secret that respiratory illnesses are on the rise in our county.
San Diego County is rolling out a newRespiratory Virus Surveillance Report tool to track the flu and COVID-19 in our community.
County data shows nearly 1,664 people have caught the flu and 86,608 have battled COVID-19 since July of this year.
The spike in flu cases is a trend medical experts say they knew was coming after watching flu patterns in Australia.
"Two weeks ago, we started seeing the evidence of this. It started with the high schools — all of a sudden a lot of people were calling out sick. We were tracking all along but we were starting to see an increase in influenza," said Dr. William Tseng, Kaiser Permanente.
Dr. Tseng said the county’s newly launched respiratory virus surveillance report is a tool that tells a lot.
"That’s what these reports can do is they can give us a glimpse of what is to come and hopefully we can avoid the worse of it," he said.
He said what he’s seeing in the hospital is more RSV cases, not the flu. The new tool doesn't track RSV cases.
The report shows that 50 percent of those sick with the flu this year are kids between the ages of five and 17, whereas last year adults 18 to 49 accounted for half of the flu cases, so far this October.
"It’s not wrong that we want to get kids back together. It’s not wrong that we want students to learn in a face-to-face environment, but what we want to do is make that environment as safe as possible," said Dr. Tseng.
Dr. Tseng is urging the community to get vaccinated.
More than 209,219 people have been boosted, while 494,919 have gotten the flu shot so far this year, according to county data.
