Many people are feeling lousy right now as the winter stew of respiratory viruses simmers. But there are a couple of unusual trends driving all the coughing, sneezing and fevers this year.

First, the good news: This winter’s COVID-19 surge has been mild.

“This year’s winter wave is low compared to previous winters,” says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “This is the smallest winter wave we’ve had since the pandemic began.”

The weekly rate at which people are getting hospitalized for COVID this winter peaked at about 4 per 100,000, compared with about 8 per 100,000 last season, about 11 per 100,000 in the 2022-2023 season and 35 per 100,000 in the 2021-2022 season, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

One possible explanation for the relatively mild COVID winter is that the U.S. experienced an unusually intense summer COVID wave that also started relatively late. As a result, many people may still have some immunity from when they had COVID during the summer.

“There are less people available to get infected because they had a recent boost in immunity,” says Rivers.

Flu may be crowding out COVID

At the same time, no new variant has evolved that’s any better at getting around the immunity people have built up, according to Aubree Gordon, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

Another possible factor is “viral interference,” she says. That’s a phenomenon that occurs when the presence of one virus pushes out other viruses. Some scientists think that may be one of the reasons there a decrease in infections with other respiratory viruses, such as flu and RSV, during the early, heavy COVID waves.

“It’s possible that viral interference is playing a role this year,” Gordon says. “There’s a lot of influenza circulating. It may generate some non-specific immunity — some nonspecific protection, which then prevents people from getting other respiratory infections, such as SARS-CoV-2 — sort of crowds it out.”

That said, COVID is still spreading widely, causing people to miss work, children to miss school and even making some people so sick they end up in the hospital or die. So Rivers says people shouldn’t let down their guard, especially because taking steps to protect against COVID can also protect against other viruses, like RSV and the flu.

Flu rebounds and could stick around

The bad news trend this year is the flu. This year’s flu season started unusually early and has been spreading at high levels around the country. And now, it looks like the U.S. is experiencing a second peak of flu activity this winter.

“Influenza activity first peaked around the turn of the new year — late December, early January. Activity then declined for several weeks in a row, which is usually a sign that the season is on its way out,” Rivers says. “But then it really took an unusual turn and started to rise again. So activity is now at a second peak — just as high as it was at the turn of the new year. It’s unusual.”

The rate at which people were going to doctor for a fever and cough or sore throat, which is one way the CDC tracks the flu, dropped from 6.8% to 5.4%, but then started to rise again, reaching 7 %, according to Rivers.

So the intensity of this year’s flu season could have a long tail, she says. “This could turn out to be an unusually severe flu season,” Rivers says.

The cause of the second peak remains unclear. So far testing hasn’t spotted any signs that the H5N1 flu virus, which has been spreading among poultry and dairy cows, is circulating widely in people, contributing to the second peak.

So the cause remains a mystery, Rivers says. It could just be the kind of natural variation that happens with the flu.

Still, the more people who catch the flu, the greater the chances that people could get infected with both viruses — the regular flu and bird flu. And that could give the bird flu the opportunity to swap genes with the regular flu and evolve into something more dangerous.

“That is certainly a huge concern,” says Gordon. “The danger with flu activity is that we have so many people that are infected with these seasonal viruses that it could increase the chance that you get a co-infection in a person with one of these seasonal viruses and H5N1, which gives the opportunity to generate a new virus that transmits really well from human to human. And that is one way you can get a pandemic.”

Dozens of Head Start programs nationwide — including at least six in California — have experienced delays in accessing government money for payroll and expenses in the week since the Trump administration announced a freeze on federal funding.

The centers, which rely entirely on federal funding to provide child care to low-income children, were thrown into a panic last week, when the Office of Management and Budget announced a sweeping freeze on federal aid. The White House later clarified that Head Start would not be affected by the freeze, and OMB rescinded the memo after it was temporarily blocked by a federal judge.

Nonetheless, a growing number of Head Start grant recipients, which operate on razor-thin margins, have reported delays in accessing approved grant funding, according to the National Head Start Assn. While most Head Start programs have not experienced major disruptions, some have had no other option but to close down services, while others are scrambling to find other funding sources to keep their doors open, the association said.

As of Thursday — 10 days after the federal freeze was announced — the association said at least 52 programs across 22 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico are still experiencing funding delays. The programs, which serve nearly 20,000 children from birth through age 5, report receiving “pending” or “in process” messages when they request to draw down funds from their grant from an online payment system.

“Without the ability to predictably pay the rent, buy the food needed to feed the children, and meet payroll, our entire operation is in jeopardy. And the ones who suffer the most are the children in our care,” said Yasmina Vinci, executive director of the National Head Start Assn. “We urge President Donald Trump and the acting leadership at the Department of Health and Human Services to immediately address the issues leading to unnecessary delays in funding.”

As of Tuesday, Melanee Cottrill, executive director of Head Start California, said at least six California-based Head Start programs were experiencing funding delays. Cumulatively, those programs employ 884 people and serve 3,856 children. At least one program in Los Angeles County — with 250 staff and 1,400 children — was “on the brink of closing,” as even a small delay can be “a serious problem,” she said.

That program, along with one other, has since received the payments.

Head Start programs are required to spend funds within three days of receiving them, so they tend to gather up their bills and then once or twice a week request money to pay them. Typically, the money lands in their bank account one day later. But since the federal freeze was announced, programs are waiting 5 to 7 days for the money.

“Our programs have bills, and they don’t have the money to pay them,” Cottrill said. Smaller programs in particular tend not to have a financial cushion and are incurring late fees and interest, which they are not allowed to use Head Start funding to pay, putting them in financial jeopardy. Head Start programs across California serve about 90,000 children and employ 25,000 workers.

Several programs in other states closed down temporarily because of funding delays. In an added complication, the federal Office of Head Start is housed within the Department of Health and Human Services, which the Trump administration prohibited from communicating with the public, Cottrill said. “We’re not getting the guidance we normally would, and we’re left out in the wind trying to figure out what’s happening.”

The Los Angeles County Office of Education is the largest Head Start grantee in the region and contracts with school districts and private nonprofits to serve 8,000 children and families. Recently, a $10-million payment request was delayed by a week, said Luis Bautista, executive director of the agency’s Head Start and Early Learning Division.

The county office had sufficient reserves to keep their programs running, but that’s not the case for most Head Start grantees, which tend to be small agencies, he said.

“The minute you tell them, ‘no money,’ even if it’s for a few days or a few weeks, they probably need to think about closing their doors temporarily and furloughing employees.”

Jocelyn Tucker, assistant director at the Foundation for Early Childhood Education Inc. in Pasadena, which serves 500 children, said she has not yet experienced a funding delay but says there’s still a sense of “widespread uncertainty” at her program.

“Everybody’s nervous and everybody’s on edge wondering what’s going to happen. Parents as well. Head Start serves the lowest-income families. What else is there?” Tucker said. “Parents need to drop their kids off to go to work. If there’s nowhere for the kids to go, they can’t go to work or pay their bills. It’s just a snowball effect.”

This article is part of The Times’ early childhood education initiative, focusing on the learning and development of California children from birth to age 5. For more information about the initiative and its philanthropic funders, go to latimes.com/earlyed.