For the second year in a row, the incidence of lab-confirmed seasonal influenza is so low, it’s barely registering across Canada.

Each fall and winter, the incidence of influenza rises and peaks before dying out again, but flu cases suddenly disappeared when COVID struck in the late winter of 2020 and case numbers have remained low ever since.

The provincial influenza report has not been updated since March of 2020 and Health Canada’s most recent flu watch report for the week ending January 8 shows only 27 lab-confirmed detections of influenza in the country—26 influenza A and one influenza B.