Flu season isn’t over yet in North Texas, despite what looked like a momentary drop in some flu-related metrics after the new year, health officials say
This year’s wave of flu infections seems to be matching last year’s — a “pretty bad season,” said Dr. Philip Huang, Dallas County Health and Human Services director.
“We’re still in the thick of things right now,” Huang said.
Despite a decrease in flu positivity rates since the end of December, Dr. Trish Perl, associate dean at the UT Southwestern O’Donnell School of Public Health, agreed with Huang. She said there are potentially two to six weeks of flu season left this year, though it’s hard to know exactly how the spread will proceed.
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“It’s predictably unpredictable,” Perl said. “It was a little earlier than it has been in the past few years that we’ve had an initial spike. Now it looks like it’s downtrending a little bit, but there are some indications that that may just be a little blip down and it could go back up, so we’re not out of the woods yet.”
Health officials also publish some data sources two to three weeks behind, since it can take several weeks to collect and verify flu cases.
In addition to test positivity, public health experts use several other indicators to monitor flu conditions, including emergency room visits and wastewater data, Perl said. Flu-related ER visits spiked to more than 6,700 during the week ending Dec. 27 in Public Health Region 2/3, which includes the Dallas-Fort Worth and Wichita Falls metro areas. In the last three years, flu peaks have reached at least 7,700 weekly ER visits, usually later in the winter.
In general, respiratory virus spikes lead to increased volume in hospital emergency rooms, Perl said. This year’s flu has followed that pattern, especially in December.
“The ERs were really very, very busy,” Perl said, both with flu patients and those with other issues, all contributing to the strain on hospitals.
North Texas Medical Center, which serves the Gainesville area, saw a decrease in December flu-related ER visits from about 91 in 2024 to 75 in 2025, said Wendy Slaughter, respiratory therapy and telemetry supervisor. Many patients were children or older people with comorbidities, she said, with severe pneumonia symptoms.
However, that decrease hasn’t eased the seasonal strain from flu cases on that hospital’s 11-bed ER.
“We just have to do our best to treat them, get them through well enough to go home to continue recovery, so we can free up our bed space,” Slaughter said.
Baylor University Medical Center’s ER is also seeing more patients and conducting more testing during flu season, said Dr. Christina Bird, medical director of emergency medicine.
Bird added that Baylor’s emergency department is prepared to handle this year’s spike, which she anticipates will closely follow last season’s trends. Medical experts look to previous flu trajectories to inform what the current outlook could be.
“The first two weeks of the year, we’re leveling off, which was … a similar pattern to what I saw last year,” she said. “I expect that we’ll see higher positivity rate as we continue to get through the bulk of what we consider cold and flu season.”
In both the 2022-23 and 2023-24 flu seasons, Region 2/3 hit a maximum of about 7,700 weekly flu-related ER visits. Last year, the number of maximum weekly visits reached more than 13,000 the week.
But those peaks don’t always occur in the same month. While the previous two peaks both came in early February, the 2022-23 season’s weekly visits maxed out that November.
There’s also not always a singular peak per season. The last two flu seasons had a local crest in December followed by a similar or higher spike in February.
Wastewater data is another indicator that suggests the flu could resurge this year, Perl said. Since the December flu spike declined, some readings from wastewater sites have shown small comebacks. Whether this metric precedes or lags behind other flu measurements such as ER visits is still an open research question, Perl said.
Many experts worry that a mismatched vaccine and lower vaccination rates contributed to this year’s serious flu season. The 2025-26 flu vaccine did not include antigens against an increasingly dominant variant of influenza A commonly known as subclade K, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Researchers did not sequence subclade K’s genetic information until after the World Health Organization released its recommended list of flu strains for vaccine producers in February last year.
Still, epidemiological evidence suggests the 2025-26 flu vaccine protects against severe flu, Perl said. She and Huang said the decline in vaccination rates over the past several years has also resulted in more flu spread this winter.
Survey data from the CDC found 51.9% of children in Texas received the flu vaccine in early January 2023. That coverage has decreased every year since then to 37.8% as of Jan. 3, 2026.
Adult vaccinations are more of a mixed bag, according to the CDC. Texas adults’ coverage rates in mid-December have hovered around 40% for the last five years. Some estimates suggest 80% of healthy people and 90% of high-risk people need to be vaccinated for herd immunity against the flu, though these thresholds can be difficult to achieve, Huang said.
The politicization of vaccines since the COVID-19 pandemic has likely contributed to lower vaccination rates, Huang said. More recently, the threat of immigration enforcement raids has caused many in Hispanic communities to stay home and not receive the flu shot, he added.
If it’s not an option to get a flu vaccine, people should at least wash their hands thoroughly, wear a mask, and stay home when sick to prevent spreading the flu, experts say.
Even now, it’s not too late to get the shot. Perl and Huang said getting a flu vaccine now will not only help prevent hospitalization, it can also counteract viral strains other than subclade K that are still circulating. The vaccine starts offering immunity after about 10 days, and there are likely still weeks left in the 2025-26 flu season.
“Vaccines … may not prevent all of the infections, but they prevent some of the severe consequences,” Perl said. “And there are severe consequences we see out there.”