On December 29, 2025, Urgences-santé logged 1,358 ambulance calls, the second-busiest day in the service’s 30-year history. Despite freezing rain and holiday traffic, paramedics and physicians pointed to a more consistent driver behind the spike: influenza.
For students across Montreal, including at McGill, Concordia, UQAM, and Université de Montréal, the surge is tangible: it’s showing up as empty lecture seats, missed shifts, and an illness that’s lingering longer than many expect.
“I’ve lived in Montreal my whole life, so I usually don’t get sick much,” said a McGill student interviewed on January 8, her first day back at school. “But I caught the flu that’s been going around and it left me bedridden for over two weeks. Even talking right now hurts my throat. I’m only starting to feel normal again — a pretty awful way to spend New Year’s.”
A Steep Curve and a Crowded System
Clinicians have described this season’s rise as unusually sharp. In a Canadian Press report, infectious disease physician Donald Vinh from McGill University Health Center (MUHC) said emergency rooms are “bursting at the seams” as the province grapples with a combination of the flu, COVID-19, and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). He called influenza the “main culprit,” describing an epidemiological curve that is “downright scary” and rising at a rate that is “almost vertical.”
Quebec’s own surveillance data backs up the sense of intensity. According to the Institute National de Sante Publique Quebec’s (INSPQ) weekly respiratory virus reporting, influenza A detections and test positivity climbed to very high levels in late-December and early-January period. In the week ending January 3, Quebec reported 6,231 influenza A positive tests, and Montreal’s influenza A test positivity was 27.43 per cent. The week prior (ending December 27, 2025) was higher still, with Montreal at 34.31 per cent positivity.
For comparison, in the final week of December 2024, Quebec’s overall influenza test positivity was 8.4 per cent (835 positives out of 10,889 tests). In the final week of December 2025 (Dec 21-27), that figure jumped to 38.3 per cent (6,525 positives out of 17,092 tests), more than 4 times higher than in 2024.
The downstream effect is visible in emergency departments. In the same CBC report on Urgences-santé’s record day, Quebec-wide ER stretcher occupancy was cited at 128 per cent, with Montreal at 135 per cent. At the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM), CityNews reported the emergency room was “packed” with 159 patients, and patients on stretchers were waiting an average of nearly 17 hours. These kinds of delays and overcrowded triage areas become harder to manage when large numbers of patients arrive with fever, dehydration, breathing difficulty, or complications that require monitoring.
Public health experts often caution against drawing big conclusions from anecdotes alone. Still, the collision of factors this winter helps explain why so many Montrealers describe the season as unusually disruptive. Influenza activity has been high at the same moment people have been spending more time indoors, over the holidays and through winter weather, before returning to shared spaces like classrooms, offices, gyms, and public transit. At the same time, clinicians have pointed to a broader mix of respiratory viruses circulating alongside the flu, which adds pressure to urgent care and emergency medicine. And because hospitals are already operating near or above capacity, surges don’t have to be unprecedented to create bottlenecks; they simply have to be sustained. Put simply: even if many influenza cases can be managed at home, a small increase in severe cases, layered onto an already-strained system, can push hospitals past capacity.
The campus question: what happens when everyone comes back?
Universities are built for close contact: packed lecture halls, shared libraries, group projects, residence floors, and winter commutes. That implication matters when influenza is already widespread in the city.
McGill has previously hosted flu vaccination access points on campus. A November 12, 2025 flu-vaccine clinic run through the Ingram School of Nursing and the Student Wellness Hub administered 112 flu shots in a single day, with organizers describing the goal as making vaccination easy for students and staff.
However, the vaccination clinics in November didn’t fully answer the question students are asking in January: what protections exist once people are back in the same rooms, day after day?
Students interviewed on campus said they’re less focused on sweeping mandates and more about concrete, low-friction options, clear guidance about staying home when feverish, readily available masks in clinical spaces, and easy routes to vaccination and advice.
With emergency services already strained, physicians and public health agencies have emphasized steps that reduce both transmission and unnecessary hospital visits. One is vaccination: in Montreal, public health authorities state that the flu vaccine is free for anyone aged six months and older who requests it. Another is triage: Quebec health messaging during this surge has encouraged people to call Info-Santé 811 for guidance when symptoms are concerning but not clearly life-threatening, reserving emergency departments for severe cases.
Clinicians also continue to recommend straightforward harm reduction: staying home when sick, masking when symptomatic in crowded indoor spaces, and basic hygiene. None of these eliminate risk, but in aggregate they can slow spread, and in a season defined by capacity limits, slowing spread can translate into fewer crises.
This winter’s crunch is also landing in a healthcare landscape shaped by earlier tensions. In the fall, Quebec medical students mounted strike action over training conditions and the future of access, with reporting noting fears that policy direction and working conditions could worsen physician availability. Influenza didn’t cause those structural issues, but it exposes them. When stretchers are already full and staff are already stretched, the margin for absorbing a predictable winter surge becomes thin.
For students returning to campus, that reality raises a blunt question: in a city where ERs are routinely over capacity, what does “normal winter sickness” look like now? And for those currently sick, the answer is immediate and personal: a virus can be ordinary, and still knock you flat.