When it comes to the flu season in Quebec, some places have been hit harder than others. More people have come down with the flu in Montreal than in Quebec City.
Staff at emergency rooms in Quebec City say they’ve seen fewer cases of the flu this year.
“What is particular is that we have very few of those patients (especially) if we compare to Montreal, which seems to have a lot of those,” said Pascale St-Pierre, a spokesperson with CHU de Quebec.
One of the province’s flu experts, Dr. Gaston De Serres, said this week’s numbers – in the range of 15 to 20 per cent in Quebec City and 25 per cent in Montreal – indicate a normal discrepancy that sometimes exists in different regions.
“For example, we are now having the epidemic in Quebec but in the western part of Canada, the epidemic started certainly a few weeks earlier,” De Serres said.
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There is a difference between this year’s flu season and last year’s but it isn’t a good one, De Serres said. Unlike last year’s flu, this year’s strain will impact seniors more severely.
“A year like this year will have more hospitalization and death because the sub-type that circulates is the H3N2,” he explained.
De Serres said Quebec communities where there are few cases of flu right now could begin to see a lot more in the coming weeks.
There is one positive piece of news, though. De Serres said more and more Quebecers are slowly getting the flu shot each year.
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