Canada’s Hospitals Strained as Respiratory Illness Hospitalizations Double, While Vaccine Rates Fall

Nearly 60,000 Canadians were hospitalized for respiratory illnesses that vaccines could have prevented in 2024 and health officials are sounding the alarm.

New data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) paints a sobering picture of the country’s post-pandemic health landscape: hospitalization rates for COVID-19, influenza, and RSV have more than doubled compared to pre-pandemic levels, even as fewer Canadians are rolling up their sleeves for annual vaccines.

In 2024, Canada recorded 142 hospitalizations for every 100,000 people due to vaccine-preventable respiratory illnesses more than double the 66 per 100,000 reported in 2019, before the pandemic reshaped everyday life.

Influenza and RSV together accounted for the majority of those admissions, but COVID-19 was far from a footnote. The virus was responsible for more than 40 per cent of all hospitalizations in the category a stark reminder that what was once a crisis has quietly settled into a chronic burden on the health system.

“Even though we’re really tired of hearing about it, it’s around to stay,” said Melanie Josée Davidson, director of the health system performance team at CIHI. “It’s having a fairly large impact on our hospital services.”

Each COVID-19 hospitalization carries a heavy cost financially and physically. The average stay runs about 23 days, translating to roughly $28,500 per patient. Multiplied across tens of thousands of admissions, the strain on already stretched hospital budgets is enormous.

For frontline physicians like Dr. Fahad Razak, an internal medicine specialist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, the data reflects a daily reality that is increasingly difficult to manage.

“One of the toughest parts of the job,” he said, is watching the steady stream of patients being admitted for illnesses that could have been avoided. Hospitals across the country are frequently operating at or beyond capacity a situation Razak describes plainly as a “red flag.”

The problem is compounded by the nature of respiratory illnesses. Unlike a broken arm or a scheduled surgery, a wave of viral infections does not arrive with much warning and does not discriminate. When COVID-19 and seasonal viruses hit simultaneously, they flood wards with patients who need prolonged care, squeezing out room for those dealing with unrelated medical emergencies.

“Everything happens in that one place,” Razak explained. “When you have a big wave of patients coming in every respiratory virus season plus with COVID, it can be really almost any time of year this is an unneeded additional pressure.”

And there is no quick fix. Razak was candid about the limits of what the health system can do in the short term. Hiring more staff takes time, building more beds takes longer, and constructing a new hospital from a funding announcement to opening day can take the better part of a decade.

“We Canadians collectively, we have to make the system work,” he said.

What makes the hospitalization figures especially frustrating for public health officials is that many of these admissions were, in theory, preventable.

Government of Canada data shows that only 26 per cent of Canadian adults received a COVID-19 booster in the fall of 2024. For seasonal influenza, just one in three adults got vaccinated during the 2024–2025 season. Even among seniors the demographic most vulnerable to severe illness COVID-19 vaccination coverage reached only 54 per cent.

“It’s telling us that our public health system at the moment isn’t reaching our people with the immunizations they need to keep them healthy,” said Dr. Natasha Crowcroft, vice-president of infectious diseases and vaccination programs with the Public Health Agency of Canada.

The consequences are not abstract. Adults aged 75 and older accounted for nearly half 46 per cent of all vaccine-preventable respiratory hospitalizations in 2024. For many of them, a serious bout of influenza or COVID-19 does not simply mean a difficult week. It can permanently alter the trajectory of their lives.

“It can end up making them so debilitated that they go from being somebody who’s living healthily at home, on their own, doing their own thing, to being someone who needs long-term care,” Crowcroft said.

Her message to caregivers and health-care providers working with older Canadians was equally direct: getting vaccinated is not just a personal choice. In close-care settings, it is an act of protection for the people around you.

Perhaps the most telling detail in this broader conversation comes not from statistics, but from what patients say after they leave hospital.

Razak has heard it more times than he can count people who spent a week or more in a hospital bed, some of whom watched others on the ward not make it, who look back and wish they had simply gotten the shot.

“I think many patients will say at the end of a process like this they’re in hospital for a week, of course some people die, but for those who then leave hospital they’ll say, ‘I’m going to get my vaccine next year,'” he recalled.

His advice to Canadians is straightforward treat vaccination the same way you treat a seatbelt. You do not put one on because you expect a crash. You put one on because you would rather not find out what happens without it.

“Getting your vaccine every year just means there’s one less thing you have to worry about,” he said. “And I’d love for more Canadians to think about it that way.”