SAN DIEGO — Respiratory illnesses typically spike over the winter, especially with holiday travel and gatherings this time of year. But has the cold and flu season hit its peak here in San Diego? CBS 8 is working for you to find out the latest case numbers.
“We’ve seen an increase in COVID, influenza, and even RSV, so seeing a little bit of an uptick. But right now over the last week, even seeing that level off and maybe decline a bit,” said Dr. Anil Keswani, Chief Medical and Operations Officer for Ambulatory Care at Scripps Health.
“Looks like our most recent data points show that we would’ve plateaued, and again, that’s really encouraging news and makes a lot of sense given the holiday gatherings and travel that happened over the holidays.”
CBS 8 looked at the County’s COVID case numbers. Daily hospitalizations peaked on Dec. 26 at 198 cases and steadily dropped to 174 on Dec. 30. At Scripps Health, they’ve seen a bit of an uptick in COVID cases.
“We have 80 patients in-house that have COVID and that’s compared to about 60 a week ago,” said Dr. Keswani. “To give you context, our maximum COVID numbers were about 500 back about three years ago. So while we’re far, far from our maximum, we did see a bit of a jump over the last week.”
According to the County’s Respiratory Virus Surveillance Report, since July 2, we’ve seen 31,518 COVID cases, 9,031 cases of the flu, and 3,651 RSV cases. But weekly case totals for all three viruses started coming down the last week of the year.
“It looks like for RSV, we may be past the worst of it, that we’ve hit our peak and coming down. That’s what it looks like nationally and San Diego’s numbers are tracking the same,” said Dr. Edmund Milder, Pediatric Infectious Disease Specialist at Rady Children’s Hospital.
All three of these viruses can overlap in how their symptoms are presented
“People are going to have a runny nose, a cough, sometimes a fever, maybe some achy muscles, and it’s hard to know exactly what you have,” said Dr. Milder. “For most people, if you’re healthy otherwise and able to stay hydrated and have a good amount of energy, these are things you can handle at home, no matter what the virus is.”
While we may be seeing cold and flu numbers starting to decrease, as we typically do in January and February, both doctors told CBS 8 that the flu shot is still useful.
“If somebody is sick, go do the same thing we’ve been saying all along,” said Dr. Keswani. “Make sure that you’re avoiding social contact so we’re not spreading these viruses, you know, make sure if you’re not feeling well, stay at home as opposed to coming into the office.”
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