This year's flu season never actually happened, says BCCDC

Victor Chu administers a flu shot at his downtown Vancouver Pharmasave on Thursday, Oct. 8, 2020. (CTV)

Vancouver — Flu season has officially came to an end, with a total of one detected case of unexpected influenza in all of B.C.

The BC Centre for Disease Control has released its last flu bulletin of the season, and says that the 2020-2021 flu season was the “season that wasn’t.”

“This influenza season was exceptional in not having actually really happened,” it reads.

The bulletin comes amid the global pandemic, during which B.C. has seen more than 140,000 cases of COVID-19 respiratory infections, which are different from influenza or “the flu.”

According to the BCCDC, there has been “no sign on influenza virus circulation” this past fall, winter and early spring.

Out of more than 75,000 flu tests processed in labs, only 18 have come back positive. Those 18 tests were done on 11 people – meaning some people tested positive for more than one type of the flu virus.

Ten of those 11 people had recently received special flu vaccines, called the “live attenuated influenza vaccine.” Their illnesses were considered to have been caused by the vaccine, which the BCCDC calls “vaccine-type” virus cases, and which it differentiates from the “wild-type” of virus most commonly spread unexpectedly by close contact with an infected person.

The one case of “wild-type” virus was linked to out-of-country travel and likely imported, according to the bulletin.

This stands in stark contrast to other years. For example last flu season, 2019 - 2020, when a similar number of flu tests were done (70,446) approximately 6,600 came back positive. It also stands in contrast to the yearly average between 2015 and 2019, when an average of 28,000 flu tests were done each year, and more than 5,500 came back positive.

The BCCDC counts the flu season as starting at the end of September and ending on May 1.