Flu season has arrived early this year in New York City, with cases climbing dramatically during the past month.
New York City and the surrounding areas — including Long Island and North Jersey — had some of the highest levels of flu-like illness in the United States as of Dec. 6, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The city’s acting health commissioner, Dr. Michelle Morse, urged people to get flu shots and, if they felt sick, to wear a mask. She said flu cases were “skyrocketing” in New York City.
Poly Prep Country Day School, a private school in Brooklyn, closed for two days last week after at least 200 students were absent or sent home with the flu or flu-symptoms, according to Jennifer Slomack, the school’s senior director of engagement and communications.
Poly Prep shut its Dyker Heights campus, which includes almost 900 students at its upper and middle schools, on Wednesday and Thursday, after roughly one-third of the student body became ill earlier in the week, Ms. Slomack said.
“That number in such a short period played a part in our decision,” she said. The school used the brief closure to conduct an “intensive disinfection” of the campus before reopening on Friday, Ms. Slomack said.
The dominant strain of the flu virus that is circulating this season, known as H3N2, has acquired mutations that could help it evade the body’s disease-fighting system. That could mean that the flu shot, which is designed to amp up the immune response, would not be as effective this year as in some other years, although early data out of Britain provided reassurance that the vaccine would help prevent hospitalizations.
In Britain, the flu season began so early and accelerated so quickly that this year’s variant was branded “the super flu” in some news accounts. But flu experts in New York said it was too soon to know if this would wind up being a particularly bad flu season.
“The jury is still out on whether it is more virulent — we just don’t know yet,” Dr. Peter Palese, an influenza expert at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said.
The early start to this flu season follows an unusually high number of cases last year. The 2024-25 flu season was one of the worst in recent years, with the C.D.C. characterizing it as “high severity” for the first time since 2017-18.
But last year, New York City did not reach 10,000 laboratory-reported cases of flu until late December. This year, that threshold was crossed by the end of November.
“It’s earlier and faster this year, and the trajectory is much quicker than usual,” said Dr. Bruce Farber, the chief of public health and epidemiology at Northwell Health, the state’s largest hospital system.
Emergency rooms across the city reported a marked rise in flu cases starting the third week of November. The percentage of emergency room patients who were diagnosed with the flu more than doubled from 0.6 percent to 1.6 percent in a week, before doubling again to 3.4 percent a week later, according to data from the New York City Health Department.
The C.D.C.’s map of influenza-like illness, based on data from health care visits across the country, rates New York City and the surrounding region as having had some of the highest levels of flu-like activity in the United States during the first few days of December. Denver had similar rates, as did New Orleans. Only Lafayette, La., not quite 150 miles to the west of New Orleans, had a higher rate of patient visits for flu-like symptoms.
While Poly Prep endured an outbreak of flu-like illness, the arrival of the respiratory virus does not appear to have had a significant impact so far on attendance at New York City’s public school system, the largest in the United States.
Across New York State, there have been more than 3,000 hospitalizations for influenza this season, just under 10 percent of the total during last flu season.
About 22 percent of New Yorkers outside the city have received a flu shot this season, according to state data.
In New York City, just over a quarter of children 6 months and older have received the flu shot this season. The city’s Health Department says that there has been a 6.5 percent decline in the number of flu shots administered to children compared with the same period last year. No figures on adult vaccination levels in New York City were available.
Joseph Goldstein covers health care in New York for The Times, following years of criminal justice and police reporting.
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