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We may be frolicking with the boys of spring in Tucson these days, but brace yourselves: That scourge of winter — the flu — is peaking right now in Southern Arizona.

Just as champion golf stars hit the links and big-league baseball players swarm the diamonds, the flu virus is finally making its move, with this season's reported cases spiking to 75 in Pima County and a suddenly impressive 703 statewide.

And sure enough, the city's largest emergency room, at Tucson Medical Center, is handling a "red flag" surge of patients, consistently topping 300 a day this week.

"This is the peak. It's not really a big one, but this is the biggest bump in cases we've seen in a single week this season," county epidemiologist Lisa Hulette said Wednesday.

The 24 new flu cases confirmed here by the end of last week easily tripled previous weeks' totals since the virus first appeared in late November.

Even so, you can forget about getting a flu shot — those are long gone. For now, the mantra is "infection control": Stay home if you're sick, wash your hands a lot, cough into your sleeve, that sort of thing.

"In October and November, the message is flu shot, flu shot, flu shot," said Will Humble, assistant deputy director of the Arizona Department of Health Services.

"But now, with the shot clinics out of business for the season, the message is, control the spread. Do everything you can to protect yourself from giving or getting the bug," he said.

Although we often associate a flu outbreak with going down for the count during the Christmas season — as happened last year — a February flu surge is actually much more likely, at least in the desert Southwest.

"What's happening right now is very typical for Arizona," Humble said. "If you look at the records for the past 10 years, they show a February peak most of those years. What happened last year was unusual. This year, we've got a more typical season, in terms of when it hit and how much there is."

It's actually a good thing to see a late flu peak, he said.

"This way, it gives us more time to get vaccinated and for the vaccine to take effect," he said. "A lot of people got their shots between Thanksgiving and January, so all those people are protected now."

Unlike in past years, there was no vaccine shortage this flu season. So with the season starting late and building slowly, there will be lots of unused vaccine, Humble predicted.

"We're going to see some vaccine going to the landfill, sadly," he said.

Just as the flu case numbers started to jump in midmonth, so did the number of people showing up with "flulike symptoms" at TMC's emergency room.

"We've started running pretty steadily at more than 300 (patients) a day for the past week," TMC spokesman Michael Letson said, noting that the daily count more commonly hovers around 250. "When we are consistently seeing patient numbers over 300, that's a marker, a red flag. We know something is going on."

Although many patients are suffering flulike illnesses, most cases are not laboratory-tested and confirmed. That's why state and county case numbers represent only a small portion of the real flu impact hitting right now.

"The other factor is a whole lot of people in Tucson at this time, especially people from out of town, who have no other health-care resource but the ER," Letson said.

Though flu cases are most definitely up in Tucson, the virus is striking hardest in the Phoenix area, by far. Cases there have been leaping by 100 a week through February, now totalling 557 in Maricopa County.

That has bumped flu activity in Arizona to "regional," the second-highest category by federal standards, with Arizona joining 14 other states. But 19 states are now reporting "widespread" flu outbreaks, the highest level.

Flu is likely to linger in Arizona — and Pima County — well into March, with cases declining by the second or third week of that month, Humble said.

"We've seen some flu cases all the way into June," he said. "It happens."