Flu in Germany right now

Flu in Germany: this season and the last three

When the last four seasons started and peaked

A season counts as started here when flu positivity is at or above 10% for two weeks in a row — the threshold European surveillance uses to mark an epidemic. Countries define their own epidemic thresholds, so a national authority may date its season a week or two differently.

COVID-19 and RSV in Germany

Flu in Europe this week, country by country

Each country's share of positive GP sentinel swabs in the latest week it reported, highest first. Networks that only report in season, or had too few swabs, are listed at the bottom. Rows marked * are small samples (fewer than 50 swabs) and swing more from week to week.

15 of 23 networks have a current flu figure. Reporting in season only: Bulgaria, Czechia, Italy, Lithuania, Poland and Sweden. Too few swabs in the last four weeks: Portugal and Slovakia.

When does flu season start in Germany?

European flu surveillance runs from week 40 (early October) to week 20 (mid-May). Over the summer flu stays at baseline: only a few in every hundred swabs from people with flu-like illness test positive. The season is declared over when positivity falls back below 10% and stays there.

In Germany, flu went above 10% in week 40 in 2022/23, week 50 in 2023/24, week 51 in 2024/25 and week 48 in 2025/26, and peaked 7 to 10 weeks later at 55.5%–61.1% of swabs positive.

Timing differs by weeks between countries: in 2025/26, Ireland, Italy and Spain crossed 10% first, in week 44, and Cyprus, Hungary and Poland last, in week 50.

This page sets the current season against the last three, which is the quickest way to see whether this winter is early, late or unusually high.

Ill with flu, COVID-19 or RSV: what to do

Flu, COVID-19 and RSV cause similar symptoms: fever, cough, sore throat, aches and tiredness. Most healthy adults get better at home within one to two weeks with rest, plenty to drink and paracetamol or ibuprofen for fever and pain.

Stay at home while you have a fever and keep away from people at higher risk: babies, older people and anyone who is pregnant or has a weakened immune system. Antiviral medicines for flu work best when they are started within 48 hours of the first symptoms, so people in a higher-risk group should contact a doctor early.

How long are you contagious? Our calculator works out your dates from the day your symptoms started: How long am I contagious with flu?

Ill in Germany? Where to go and how to see a doctor online: Urgent care in Germany

How to read these numbers

Each week, GPs in every country's sentinel network take swabs from a sample of patients who come in with flu-like illness or an acute respiratory infection, and laboratories test them for influenza, SARS-CoV-2 and RSV. Test positivity is the share of those swabs that are positive. It tells you how likely it is that a flu-like illness is flu, COVID-19 or RSV right now — not how many people are ill.

For flu, below 10% is baseline: 10% is the epidemic threshold used in European sentinel surveillance. The bands above it (10–25% low, 25–40% moderate, 40–55% high, 55% and over very high), and the bands for COVID-19 (5/15/25/35%) and RSV (3/8/15/25%), are our own, so that every page uses the same scale.

Small samples swing from week to week. We leave out any week with fewer than 20 swabs, mark weeks with fewer than 50 (*), and only show a trend — a change of 3 percentage points or more against the previous week — when both weeks have at least 30. Between seasons, low-volume networks are pooled over four weeks and labelled. Only a solid weekly sample can be named Europe's highest.

The latest week is provisional: countries add late results, so a figure can still change in the next weekly release. The UK and Switzerland are not part of this dataset.

Questions people ask

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