With kids getting ready to head back to the classroom, doctors are warning parents to expect more respiratory viruses circulating in the weeks ahead. That message comes as a new report shows vaccination numbers were below 50 per cent last year.Ontario Public Health data shows positivity rates for Influenza, COVID-19 and RSV remain low overall, but are starting to inch higher. COVID-19 positivity in Ontario was up in mid-August to 1.4 per cent after dropping to as low as 0.4 per cent in July, according to the most recent data.“I think when we look at this year, we have to reflect a little bit on what we saw last year here, where we actually had a really rough flu season, particularly through December and January. And so it’s a reminder that flu seasons can be really quite terrible as well,” said Dr. Dale Kalina Samji, with the Infectious Disease Division at McMaster University. “And as somebody who works in hospitals, I can tell you through December and January, it felt like some of those COVID waves that we’d seen in the past.”Samji said respiratory illnesses typically begin picking up as the weather gets cooler and children return to school and daycare.“These kids that are school-age are not living by themselves. So they get the infections and pass them on. And then they tend to pass them on to loved ones. So onto their parents, onto their younger siblings as well, and then to their grandparents. And so it’s those extremes of age that we worry the most about serious outcomes.”Meanwhile, a new report from Merck Canada found that 48 per cent of Canadians surveyed didn’t receive any respiratory vaccines in the past year.“That’s a low number. That number goes down a lot lower when you talk about individual vaccines. So there’s a lack of knowledge out there about the opportunities people have to protect themselves, especially those at high risk,” said Dr. Alan Kaplan, the chair of the Family Physician Airways Group of Canada.Only 44 per cent received the flu vaccine while 34 per cent had the COVID-19 vaccine in the last 12 months.Sixty-four per cent of those polled said they were unlikely to proactively talk to a healthcare professional about respiratory illness prevention in the next six months. “What we also saw in the survey is for the most part, people trusted their clinicians, which is good news and appropriate because they’re all out there to try to help you,” said Kaplan. “Don’t be shy about asking your clinician, your pharmacist about vaccination to protect yourself. At the end of the day, it’s much better to prevent an illness than treat it.”Doctors say the best way to protect yourself is to get vaccinated and the advice to parents is keep sick children at home when they’re showing symptoms.The survey was fielded online between June 18 and June 23, 2026, among 1,000 Canadians aged 25 to 75 through the Ipsos iSay panel. The poll is accurate to within ±3.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20,