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Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#81

Post by rsynnott »

User23 wrote: post #4

Why did the flu also disappear in the states that had effectively no covid restrictions? This is a serious question and not an attempt at rhetoric. I really am curious. Was flu never a problem in Florida? Was voluntary compliance so widespread that heavy handed government policy had no marginal anti-flu effect? Something else?

Behavioral change. Flu is generally less infectious than covid, so it will take less voluntary behavioral change to get the flu R-number below 1 than the covid one.

Also, the whole hand-sanitiser-everywhere thing, while in retrospect probably not super effective against covid, would be expected to be quite effective for the flu.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#83

Post by gibspaulding »

Joker_vD wrote: post #52
Flatcircle wrote: post #20

I keep wondering how Lice will be able to hang around much after last year's social distancing, especially among children.

Are... are those still a thing in the first world?

I read somewhere (I think Bill Bryson's "At Home") that they were almost wiped out at one point in the 20th century, but have recently started making a comeback which seems to correlate with the rise of energy saving low temp wash cycles that aren't as effective at killing them.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#84

Post by petertodd »

khuey wrote: post #33
petertodd wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The likely explanation is that, because the flu is significantly less transmissible than COVID But why is it less transmissible? One obvious explanation is because we've lived with it all our lives, and most people already have some level of pre-existing immunity to most flu strains they're exposed to. Both due to natural infections, and vaccines. > In other words, you can probably beat back the flu significantly b…

Your link says that flu shot coverage is 51.8% for all people over 6 months of age. The 64% number is for children. Flu vaccine effectiveness is not great because they have to "guess" which variants of the flu will be most prevalent months ahead of time due to the manufacturing lead times. A lot of experts are optimistic than the mRNA vaccine technology will lead to more effective flu shots.

Thanks! Fixed.

> A lot of experts are optimistic than the mRNA vaccine technology will lead to more effective flu shots.

We will see. Influenza is unusual in its ability to evolve new variants that resist existing antibodies. It's also not clear that we even can give people repeated mRNA vaccine shots year after year. People quite often develop antibodies to glycol, which makes up the nanospheres used to get the mRNA into cells. Repeated shots may lead to severe side effects, and/or the nanospheres being destroyed before the mRNA can be delivered, rendering the vaccines ineffective.

Incidentally, this is also a problem with the new adenovirus technology used in the Astra Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines: your immune system develops antibodies to the carrier virus as well as the target proteins. Subsequent shots with the same adenovirus can be destroyed prior to being able to get into cells and express the desired protein; there isn't an infinite supply of suitable adenovirus strains. The Sputnik V vaccine actually uses a different adenovirus for the first and second shots for this reason.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#85

Post by linuxftw »

ibraheemdev wrote: post #5

Just speculating here, but maybe because of false positives where flu cases get labeled as Covid? I've heard that PCR tests were not meant to be used for large scale virus detection. EDIT: The PCR test quote was fact checked and deemed to be misleading, but it still sounds like they are not very accurate [0]. [0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-pcr-idUSKBN2442...

Most people (with flu-like symptoms) don't contract influenza in a given year, and the number of cases the CDC puts out each year are comprised mostly of 'suspected' cases.

Between the flu and covid, case reporting numbers are wildly unreliable.

One might ask, what incentives are there to over report a given illness at any given time?

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#86

Post by hvac »

jMyles wrote: post #54
User23 wrote: post #4

Why did the flu also disappear in the states that had effectively no covid restrictions? This is a serious question and not an attempt at rhetoric. I really am curious. Was flu never a problem in Florida? Was voluntary compliance so widespread that heavy handed government policy had no marginal anti-flu effect? Something else?

The notion that horizontal interdiction is responsible for this suppression is absolutely, positively absurd and will never stand up to scrutiny. On the other hand, this patterns very neatly with previously observed and well-documented phenomena of viral interference, specifically with respect to influenza. Here's a good paper to start a journey of research on this topic: https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/212/11/1…

Norovirus was also decimated last year, and it doesn't infect the same organs/cells as respiratory viruses: https://www.cdc.gov/norovirus/reporting/norostat/data.html

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#87

Post by fridif »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #80
fecak wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Covid goes away, we can assume masking, distancing, and staying home will also go away. In that case, all communicable diseases are likely to increase, from the common cold to STDs.

This is why a tiny fringe of epidemologists has been calling for social distancing to continue for the next several years at least, even after COVID, because they see this as a chance to wipe out other common illnesses. If a person hyperspecializes in a field like epidemology, there is the risk of the person expecting all government policy to revolve around their specific concerns. Sometimes in interviews those epide…

So two weeks will turn into 5 years, and then still the viruses will come back because people are having backyard parties.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#88

Post by mrtksn »

ibraheemdev wrote: post #5

Just speculating here, but maybe because of false positives where flu cases get labeled as Covid? I've heard that PCR tests were not meant to be used for large scale virus detection. EDIT: The PCR test quote was fact checked and deemed to be misleading, but it still sounds like they are not very accurate [0]. [0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-pcr-idUSKBN2442...

Yes, that's the hypothesis of the "There's no Covid-19" crowd that will disappear whenever hospital corridors are filled with dead bodies.

On the other hand PCR test are not inaccurate at all, at least regarding false positives. There are detailed articles and even Youtube videos on the process and if you take a look, you will understand why it's quite accurate.

In essence, they create a reaction that will mass produce specific parts of the virus gene until it's detectable with a sensor. They run the reaction multiple times and then the sensor looks for luminance if I recall correctly.

Because you can't accidentally produce Covid-19 genes, the tests are very accurate. However, you might not get enough virus material when taking the sample from the patient(which can fail your reaction or you might need more cycles than usual to create a detectable amount) or it could be the case that there's a mutation in the gene that you are attempting to multiply, therefore you can get a negative test for an infected person.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#89

Post by panarky »

Every community has a baseline mortality rate during "normal" times. During abnormal times like pandemic, famine and war, more people die than usual, but often the cause isn't known.

If you subtract baseline mortality from actual mortality to get excess mortality, that's often a better estimate of the casualties from pandemic, famine and war than the death certificates for every person who died.

Excess mortality in most countries shows that Covid deaths are significantly under-reported.

And if there are fewer deaths from flu, and fewer from suicide [1], then excess mortality itself is under-reported and Covid killed even more than we thought.

[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/04/08/defying-expectations-...

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#90

Post by linuxftw »

space_fountain wrote: post #45
jimbob45 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t deserve the downvotes. There’s long been speculation that flu cases may be getting reported as COVID and vice-versa because of the symptom overlap.

Hum, I think I've only heard of this speculation coming from people who deny covid is a big deal and not that that position should be dismissed out of hand, but the overwhelming evidence is that the strong version of it at least is wrong. I'm also struggling to understand how symptom overlap would lead differences in the number of confirmed cases with PCR tests. These aren't cases confirmed by doctors talking to you…

Perhaps the corona virus is asymptomatic for some people (as is known to be), and the effects they are feeling are from the flu. How many people get a false positive (or true positive that would otherwise be asymptomatic) while also being positive for the flu?

Maybe corona virus is an enabler of some other disease, like a particularly virulent flu or some other respiratory infection.

This questions are inconvenient, so they'll go unasked by the media, let alone answered.

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