The worst of the respiratory illness season, which saw flu and RSV cases skyrocket alarmingly early and aggressively, might be in the rearview mirror, health officials said during the El Paso County Board of Health meeting on Wednesday.

Dr. Bernadette Albanese, co-medical director for El Paso County Public Health, said the influenza and RSV seasons peaked nearly four to six weeks early, but hospitalizations are now on the decline. She said a “modest” COVID-19 season also has left

officials cautiously optimistic that the cold months will continue to see relief.

“It feels like we are a bit past the hump of what we’ve been concerned about all winter in terms of these diseases,” Albanese told the board.

The flu season typically stretches from October to May with a peak between January and February, Albanese said. But by mid-december, the 2022-2023 season saw the second-highest hospitalization rates since 2016, El Paso County health spokesperson Michelle Beyrle said via email to The Gazette last month.

El Paso County recorded a peak 61 flu hospitalizations in the 50th week of the year, up from three during the same period of the 2021-2022 season, zero in 2020-2021 and 17 in 2019-2020, according to county health data.

That number sat at seven last week. The “biggest story” in the public health sphere, Albanese told the board, has been RSV.

Respiratory syncytial virus, a common respiratory disease that typically causes coldlike symptoms from which most people recover within a week or two, wreaked havoc among children early and at unprecedented rates.

According to an email from Children’s Hospital Colorado spokesperson Leila Roche, the number of patients seeking care there in November and early December, on average, was 30% higher than the busiest of days in a typical season.

Statewide, 2,433 patients have been hospitalized with RSV since Oct. 1, according to Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment data. None of these hospitalizations resulted in a pediatric death.

Roche said the hospital is seeing a decrease in well-child visits and “routine childhood vaccines,” one of several possible causes of the alarming flu and RSV numbers.

“Even though our respiratory season hit early, it usually lasts through the spring, and we’re still seeing a lot of sickness in the community,” Roche said. It’s not too late to get vaccinated.”

Beyrle said the “overall effectiveness” of masking, social distancing, increased ventilation and other measures taken in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which are now practiced less, could have stifled the spread of other respiratory illnesses at the time.

She said this could have also led to a decrease in population immunity among children.

“This factor might have contributed to more children getting infected, particularly among infants and toddlers, and those children experiencing RSV infection for the first time, which tends to be more severe than subsequent infections,” Beyrle said.

In line with statewide trends, COVID-19 cases have been significantly lower than the surges seen over the past two years in El Paso County, Albanese said.

Hospitalizations are decreasing — so much so, in fact, that the statewide COVID-19 hospitalization rate of 4.2 per 100,000 people over the past four weeks is nearing that of the flu, which sits at just under 3 per 100,000. Last season, the COVID-19 rate of 26 hospitalizations per 100,000 people overtook the flu rate of 0.8 by a vast margin in the same time period.

“Finally, after three years of this pandemic, we had a COVID winter season that may be what our norm looks like in seasons to come,” Albanese said. “It’s not going to go away, we’ll likely have it next year … But we sort of had a head-tohead flu and COVID season.”

Access to more prevention and treatment resources have kept numbers at bay, officials said, but experts are uncertain about how the newest variant to enter Colorado, XBB 1.5, could affect the public’s health.

Albanese and Beyrle said a critical factor in preventing another surge is continued community immunity, but the uptake in bivalent boosters has been “very low,” Beyrle said; as of last month, approximately 95,000 doses have been administered to county residents.

“The resources are only effective to the extent they are being utilized,” Beyrle said.