Children’s hospitals in Canada face flood of flu visits as doctors urge families to get vaccinated

High volumes put strain on limited pediatric hospital capacity, with flu season set to peak later this month.

At CHEO, eastern Ontario’s children’s hospital in Ottawa, eight times more children tested positive for influenza in November compared with the same month in 2024, while double the number of children needed to be hospitalized. Francis Ferland/CBC

Lauren Pelley, CBC News Health Dec 04, 2025

An early start to Canada’s flu season is hitting children hard, sending a flood of young patients into multiple pediatric hospitals as medical teams warn that emergency visits and admissions could keep climbing in the weeks ahead.

The hospital saw “unprecedented” numbers on Monday, with close to 300 young patients coming through the emergency department in a single day, marking a roughly 20 per cent increase from last year, CHEO’s vice-president of acute care services, Karen Macaulay, told CBC News.

Those higher volumes are already putting strain on the hospital’s limited capacity and leading staff to rely on overflow spaces for patient care, Macauley said, while public health forecasting suggests the worst is yet to come, with a peak expected later in December.

Other children’s hospitals in Ontario and Québec are seeing similar spikes in patients and bracing for a busy stretch ahead.

Dr. Harley Eisman, medical director of the division of pediatric emergency medicine at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, said the hospital’s emergency department was “pretty quiet” up until mid-November but is now seeing more than 200 patients a day, mirroring busy cold and flu seasons of years’ past.

“I worked last night, and we were seeing 12 to 15 new patients register an hour, which is certainly above our hourly capacity,” he told CBC News on Thursday morning.

Many of those patients are now testing positive for influenza A, Eisman said.

The St. Joseph’s Health Centre Just for Kids Clinic is also seeing more children with influenza-like illnesses, though the Toronto facility couldn’t give an exact count as those who are well enough to go home don’t end up being tested.

“They come in with runny nose, cough, prolonged fevers and sometimes even vomiting and diarrhea,” said Dr. Anne Wormsbecker, the clinic’s chief of pediatrics. “With the winter holidays coming up, now is a great time to book appointments for flu vaccines for the whole family, if you haven’t done so already.”

WATCH | Why Canada could face an uptick in flu cases

Dr. Christopher Labos, an epidemiologist and cardiologist, joins CBC News to discuss the upcoming flu season in Canada. CBC

8% jump in positive flu tests at children’s hospitals

The flu is now showing up far more often among kids and teens than other respiratory bugs, according to the figures from the Surveillance Program for the Rapid Identification and Tracking of Infectious Diseases in Kids, which tracks real-time trends at more than a dozen Canadian pediatric hospital sites in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Québec, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland.

Medical experts have been bracing for this to be a brutal flu season, given the global spread of an H3N2 influenza A strain that’s typically linked to higher hospitalizations — which also gained recent mutations that may make it a tougher foe for this season’s flu shot.

H3N2 is now the most-reported subtype across Canada, the latest federal figures show. Public health data also shows more than eight per cent of influenza tests country-wide are now coming back positive, with a rise in cases reported across all age groups.

Flu season is hitting Canada hard — and early. Influenza A test positivity rate at Canadian pediatric hospitals. Source: SPRINT-KIDS network (CBC)

Flu surges could spread across Canada in weeks ahead

Despite the possibility of a “slight mismatch” between this year’s vaccine and the latest H3N2 strain, Dr. Srinivas Murthy, a researcher and pediatric intensive care physician at B.C. Children’s Hospital, said the shot likely offers a substantial amount of protection against serious illness from the flu.

“People hear that, ‘Oh, it’s not a good match this year, therefore we shouldn’t get vaccinated.’ That’s not the right message,” he said. “It’s really that the vaccine, regardless, will [help prevent] severe disease, which is what we all end up caring about the most.”

Murthy said colleagues at his own hospital in Vancouver aren’t yet seeing a substantial surge in children with influenza, but he stressed that could change.

“The fact that if we’re seeing more surges in one part of the country, it’s likely that the rest of the country will start to see those surges in the next few weeks,” Murthy said.

WATCH | Alberta reports first flu death of season as experts warn of vaccine mismatch

Alberta is reporting its first death from influenza this season, and as CBC’s Jo Horwood reports, experts are warning that an evolving strain could be mismatched to the vaccine. CBC November 10, 2025

Health officials in other Northern Hemisphere nations are bracing for rising flu cases as well.

Last month, U.K. health officials warned that this is shaping up to be a particularly bad flu season while the latest figures from Scotland show flu cases across the country recently jumped by 45 per cent in one week.

U.S. medical experts are also watching the fast and early spread of the H3N2 strain, which is expected to hit older adults hardest as flu season progresses.

Lauren Pelley, Senior Health & Medical Reporter

Lauren Pelley is a senior health and medical reporter for CBC News. She’s a two-time RNAO Media Award winner for in-depth health reporting in 2020 and 2022, a silver medallist for best editorial newsletter at the 2024 Digital Publishing Awards, and a 2024 Covering Climate Now award winner in the health category. Contact her at: lauren.pelley@cbc.ca