Last week saw the year’s first reported child deaths from both influenza and COVID-19. Flu season falls in autumn and winter, with cases tending to peak between December and February, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and public data tracking throughout the region suggests that cases of flu, at least, are increasing.
There were 211 diagnosed cases of flu in Boone, Kenton and Campbell counties as of Jan. 6, according to the Kentucky Department for Public Health. There were 218 cases of COVID-19, which was, in fact, a decline from previous weeks.
Stephanie Vogel, the Northern Kentucky Health Department’s director of population health, discussed the most recent numbers on flu, COVID, RSV and HIV at the department’s quarterly population health committee meeting on Jan. 9. She noted the increase in flu cases, and discussed the department’s methodology for collecting data.
At the time of the meeting, the department only had numbers through Dec. 30. Data collection occurs weekly, and sometimes there was a delay in getting complete numbers because healthcare providers and labs didn’t submit their reports at the same time. What’s more, Vogel added, rapid tests for both flu and COVID aren’t reportable.
“We’ll still continue to get cases in, even from that week, because of the delay of healthcare providers and the labs reporting to us. So that number very likely, even for that last week, is going to be higher, and maybe even the week before that,” Vogel said.
A similar delay existed for COVID, she said. Yet, even then, much of the publicly available counts for COVID were likely inaccurate as many public health measures put in place during the pandemic had been sunset, and people were more readily relying on at-home testing rather than testing at a healthcare provider.
“We can expect that our COVID numbers are much higher than what we’ll actually see reported to us for that reason,” Vogel said. “Usually COVID cases are over double what you’re seeing for flu.”
Even with the gap in data collection, the data that is available suggests higher rates of COVID versus the flu over time, with the only recent time period in which flu cases exceeded COVID cases occurring around Thanksgiving in 2022.
Respiratory syncytial virus, another respiratory sickness known more commonly as RSV, is even trickier to track, as it’s only reportable if patients are admitted to the hospital.
Flu, COVID and RSV are all spread in the same manner, primarily through contaminated droplets in the air, so prevention strategies for all of them are the same, Vogel said.
Vogel also discussed the rates of HIV in the region during the meeting, commenting that cases among African-American residents had markedly increased since 2021. This increase had occurred in conjunction with the department’s expansion of its number of HIV testing sites.
“Are you also seeing an increased rate of testing for that population?” asked Laura Pleiman, the chair of the population health committee. “Or is it really an increased rate of positive diagnosis?”
Vogel replied that she couldn’t tell without examining the data more closely, which she couldn’t do in the context of the meeting, but that the department was working to build out its relationship with local Black residents.
In an email after the meeting, Vogel confirmed that she couldn’t say with certainty if the increase was attributable to a genuine growth in the prevalence of HIV or due to an increase in testing infrastructure.
“We don’t receive data on all the HIV tests performed to know if there is an overall increase in testing or more testing of certain populations,” Vogel wrote. “I do know that in NKY we have increased the number of locations where we are offering testing and the number of people receiving tests have increased from the last couple of years.”
There were the same number of cases, 27, of HIV in the Northern Kentucky area development district in both 2021 and 2022, according to the Kentucky Cabinet of Health and Family Services. Demographic breakdowns of HIV cases in NKY in terms of absolute numbers were not readily available.
View current numbers for flu and COVID diagnosis and death rates for both the whole state and specific counties at the Kentucky Department for Public Health’s interactive data dashboard.
Read the Department for Public Health’s statewide HIV/AIDS report for 2023 by clicking here.
Get advice on flu and COVID prevention and learn about additional resources at the Northern Kentucky Public Health Department’s dedicated webpage.