Flu season didn't start when or where it was expected. Get your shot now, health officials say

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Set us as preferred This year’s flu season started months early and in an unexpected part of the country, according to health officials.The unusually early start to the season has prompted local health officials to urge people to get their flu shots as soon as possible.In Los Angeles County, flu activity began rising in September, ahead of its typical early-November start, Dr.Dawn Terashita told The Times on Wednesday.

That isn’t a major surprise, said Terashita, associate director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health’s Acute Communicable Disease Control Program.Flu tends to be “very unpredictable,” she said, due to the ways that it mutates.But another unusual factor was that the flu season started this year in the Western states.

Typically, the flu starts in the South and Southeast, Dr.Helen Chu of the University of Washington School of Medicine told Huffpost.

The disease “then sort of migrates up and then west,” Chu said, so the West Coast tends to get the flu last.Terashita said it’s too soon to know the reason behind this phenomenon.The county’s flu season started on Sept.28.

But the early start alone, she said, isn’t an indicator that the season will be more severe, she said.The rate at which flu tests are coming back positive since the season’s start has been high in the San Francisco Bay Area and moderate in Southern California and the Sacramento Valley.Flu hospital admission rates remain low across California.

So far this year, there have been 34 flu-related deaths in the state, according to the state Department of Public Health’s online dashboard.San Francisco confirmed its first flu death of the season last week.Los Angeles County has not logged any influenza deaths yet this season, Terashita said.

In the 2025-26 flu season, the county recorded 126 influenza deaths, a rel...