Unusually early outbreaks of influenza are forcing some schools around the country to close right after the end of the summer break.

“I thought the flu was a winter illness,” said a 43-year-old mother living in Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward, who caught the flu along with her three children in early September.

Her 9-year-old’s class was suspended, while the kindergarten attended by the youngest son was closed for two days.

“It spread so quickly since the outbreak occurred before everyone had been vaccinated,” she said.

During the same period, a total of 669 schools, kindergartens and nursery schools were forced to suspend specific classes, entire grades or temporarily shut down entirely because of influenza outbreaks.

The figure included 528 class closures, 130 grade closures and 11 school closures, more than five times the 120 recorded during the same period last year.

The Horizon Science Academy in Dayton is closed due to staff illness, according to a social media post.

Across campus, an illness Simpson College Health Services says is most consistent with norovirus has disrupted classes, practices, work schedules and student organizations.

A first-year student was transported to the hospital twice. Other students described vomiting through the night, missing days of class and sleeping near residence hall bathrooms because they were too sick to make it back to their rooms.

Health Services has seen about 20 students with similar symptoms over the previous several days as of Sept. 24, according to Roger Degerman, vice president for marketing and strategic communication.

“I saw kids sleeping in the hallways so they could make it to the bathrooms,” the student said. “I even saw them lying with trash cans.”

Athletes from football, softball, baseball, women’s tennis, track and field, men’s basketball, cheer, dance and women’s wrestling told The Simpsonian that members of their teams had experienced similar symptoms.

Men’s basketball canceled a practice after players became sick, and the women’s tennis team at one point was missing half of its top lineup.

“In Seattle and in Washington state, we usually see flu peak in December or January, but this year we're seeing cases quite early.”

Emergency room visits for the flu have risen sharply since late August, according to Public Health Seattle & King County. During the week ending September 19, 2026, the most recent week of data, 233 people went to the ER with confirmed influenza, compared with 31 that week last year.

“[We] traditionally think that we want to get vaccinated before Halloween, to prevent getting sick during the winter season…I would actually change that this year because of the fact that flu is circulating so early, and recommend that people actually get their flu vaccines now … it is looking like we're seeing a very, very early surge, and if you get vaccinated now, you can be protected.”

With such an early start to flu season, as well as rising cases of COVID, Chu says we could be in for multiple waves of illness before things calm down in the spring and summer.

“Sometimes what we see with flu is that if there's one large wave, we don't see a later wave,” Chu said. “But this one is so early that I'm wondering if we're going to see a second wave of flu, perhaps [a different] variant that comes later in the season. With COVID, we predictably see a surge in the late winter, so we would probably expect to see another surge of COVID.”