Washington University students returned from winter break to find many of their peers bedridden as this year’s flu season reared its ugly head.

Executive Director of the Habif Health and Wellness Center Cheri LeBlanc wrote in an email to Student Life that Habif has documented 127 flu cases since the start of the academic year, nearly three times as many as the 2018-19 academic year’s 46 cases through Jan. 22.

“[We’re] certainly ahead of last year when we had a very mild flu season,” LeBlanc wrote.

She emphasized, however, that there were much fewer cases this year than in the 2017-2018 academic year, a particularly bad flu season, when Habif had experienced 173 flu cases by Jan. 22.

The increase in flu cases is not limited to the University. Matthew Bruckel, the chief executive officer of Total Access Urgent Care (TAUC), which has 25 locations across the St. Louis area, said that the flu seems to be worse than average this year overall. He said that 30% to 50% of the approximately 1,200 patients who visit TAUC each day have the flu or present flu-like symptoms.

“This flu season has been fairly aggressive, seemingly both locally, regionally and nationally,” Bruckel said.

Bruckel observed that while TAUC does not register patients specifically as Washington University students, the organization has seen “certainly seen a lot of [students from the University], anecdotally.”

According to Ali Ellebedy, assistant professor of Pathology & Immunology at the Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM), part of what has contributed to the severity of this year’s flu season has been a limited match between the flu vaccine and a major strain of influenza, B/Victoria. The vaccine’s success rate for the B/Victoria strain had hovered around 50% in late December and January but rose to a 65% match by Jan. 11, said Ellebedy, the principal investigator for a study researching why flu vaccines yield fleeting immune responses. For most other strains and in most good years, he said, match rates are at or above 90%.

“A strain of the virus that can escape our immunity has been circulating,” Ellebedy said. “This is very preliminary, but I think this is why we have seen this very early spike in the influenza B-strain this year,” he said, explaining that because experts at the World Health Organization begin developing the next winter’s vaccine in March each year, it can sometimes be difficult to predict which strains of the flu will be most common and include those strains in the vaccine.

Dr. LeBlanc wrote that Habif has seen three times as many cases of the B-strain flu than the A strain flu, which is similar to the national breakdown.

Despite the relative uncertainty surrounding the vaccine’s effectiveness with the B-strain of the flu, Dr. LeBlanc said that unvaccinated students were still more likely than vaccinated students to present the flu.

“Those students who have had the flu shot and still contract the flu are much less sick, [experience] lower fevers, less complications and a shorter course overall,” LeBlanc added.

So far, 2,633 students have received the flu shot on campus.

“These numbers are the highest we have had in recent years thanks to going out across campus and providing students a choice of attending one of our flu shot events as a walk in or coming in by appointment for a flu shot,” LeBlanc wrote.

In terms of preventing the flu, LeBlanc stressed how crucial the vaccine is.

“The most important thing students can do is get a flu shot,” LeBlanc wrote. “We have flu vaccine available here and I encourage any student who has not had a flu shot to book an appointment online with one of our nurses. The flu will be with us until early spring and it is not too late to get this protection.”