Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic • Hacker News Board

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#221

Post by disgrunt » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 6:44 PM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #168

ketzo wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, viral interference, yes; but I didn’t go inside a restaurant for 13 months. You’re saying that (and masking, and social distancing in general) didn’t affect influenza transmission? Why would it not?

Fortunately, there's data on this. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7010e3.htm?s_cid=mm... Although COVID-19 is definitely more virulent than influenza, it doesn't seem reasonable to just jump to the conclusion of saying "it must be the restrictions". That's definitely part of the equation, and maybe it will turn out to be the entire equation, but we don't know. > During the study period, states allowed resta…

> I guess what I'm saying is that it's a bit concerning just how fast people here are willing to jump to conclusions.

Well, the CDC/WHO have kind of conditioned them, no? The CDC, at least, is starting to realign their guidelines with the data.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#222

Post by ectopod » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 6:45 PM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #203

ineedasername wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is literally an entire industrial complex setup to fight the flu on an annual basis, including massive testing & tracking. This is how we have data on annual flu infections. If anything, this year would have been an excellent year to find more flu infections as many people who got sick didn't simply stay home and get over the illness, they went & got tested.

do people coming in to get tested for corona generally get tested for the flu?

Not in the UK. My cousin just had a bad dose of something. It's not covid (negative test, he's vaccinated and he had covid a few months ago) and it's not life-threatening so, quite reasonably, nobody cares what it is.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#223

Post by matwood » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 6:45 PM UTC

dnautics wrote: post #203

ineedasername wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is literally an entire industrial complex setup to fight the flu on an annual basis, including massive testing & tracking. This is how we have data on annual flu infections. If anything, this year would have been an excellent year to find more flu infections as many people who got sick didn't simply stay home and get over the illness, they went & got tested.

do people coming in to get tested for corona generally get tested for the flu?

Early in the pandemic, absolutely. It was easier/quicker to test for the flu and rule out covid, than test for covid to rule out the flu.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#224

Post by Lendal » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 6:46 PM UTC

BitwiseFool wrote: post #78

If I caught the flu, how would the government/scientists studying this stuff even know I got it? If you're anything like me you probably just take some time off and get over the illness without ever seeing a doctor or taking a flu-test. How do they measure such things? I suspect they use some elaborate statistical model to try and generalize the results to the whole population.

They probably know how many flu cases end up in the hospital or urgent care, then extrapolate from that number. They have historical data and also geographic, and census data, so they can make pretty good statistical estimates.

It's kinda the same math that hardware stores use to figure out how many shovels to stock in a given store each week. Nothing is a mystery if you have data.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#225

Post by he0001 » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 6:46 PM UTC

bitexploder wrote: post #162

yosito wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You realize those « deep cleans » are mostly comms operations for governments to look like they are doing stuff, right? Yes, but it must have had some effect on fomite transmission of some viruses, right?

Ehh... most viruses really don't live on surfaces very long. Unless they were continuously spraying the whole pandemic on a weekly basis I don't see how it could do much at all. And even if they were doing it every week... most of us get viruses from handled (by humans) surfaces.

Virus exist everywhere and is the most common entity on earth. In a tablespoon of seawater there can be ten million of them. Most are not dangerous to man, about 600 is known. They are also very good to survive on their own without a host and can live in most hostile environments.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#226

Post by TrevorJ » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 6:47 PM UTC

bluSCALE4 wrote: post #208

This is stupid. Both my wife and I got sick and luckily it wasn't Covid. When we were tested, that's all everyone cared about so I'm sure they didn't mark us as having the flu even though we obviously had something.

Family member had same experience. Classic flu symptoms. No breathing problems. Dr. Wrote down Covid symptoms in his notes which they did not have and had not complained of. They ordered a covid test, which was negative. I actually feel like they got WORSE care than they would have otherwise. The Dr. wasn't even interested in treating anything that wasn't covid, let alone diagnosing it.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#227

Post by davidcuddeback » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 6:47 PM UTC

pwg wrote: post #176

blueline wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how do you think they measure (roughly) how many people got the flu in previous years?

By estimation: From the article: "the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated there were roughly 22,000 deaths in the prior season and 34,000 two seasons ago." -- emphasis added

Estimation usually involves gathering data and applying some statistics to the data. The question was about the details of that process. "They estimated" isn't telling us anything new.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#228

Post by majormajor » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 6:48 PM UTC

ManBlanket wrote: post #198

paviva wrote: post #55

An alternative explanation is that of "viral interference"[1,2], i.e., the most transmissible virus boosting up viral immunity in the population, and precluding transmission of the less transmissible/fit virus [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5489283/ [2]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...

The first, "alternative explanation" the statistician in me wants to mention is perhaps the way influenza data is gathered has changed. "Only people who get tested for influenzalike illnesses—typically about 5 percent of individuals who fall ill—are tallied." If there were a change in the way these tests were administered, for example a blaring medical bias toward another disease, that would present a significant sam…

A bias towards testing for Covid wouldn't explain fewer cases of the flu unless those cases of the flu were coming back as Covid falsely instead of so further diagnosis was stopped. If you have a bad enough flue to seek treatment, then once you get that Covid test and it says "negative", you would move on to the next step for treatment. (Consistent with past years - nobody was getting flu tested just cause they had a runny nose in 2019, it was just the people who needed treatment).

There could be other explanations, such as: a desire to avoid Covid causes people to avoid seeking treatment, so more flu cases self resolve. OR: a fear of Covid causes more people to get tested when they're sick, and some of them may then go for flu testing before they would otherwise after coming back negative for Covid...?

Seems like the simplest answer is just "actions that have reduced the spread of one disease have also reduced the spread of another, that's historically less widespread already."

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#229

Post by linuxftw » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 6:49 PM UTC

space_fountain wrote: post #127

linuxftw wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leading virologists said not to give people anti-inflammatories at the beginning of the pandemic and probably killed a bunch of people. > At least the reputable ones not fishing for cheap attention from paranoid conspiracy theorists. We're not talking about paranoid conspiracy theories here, we're talking about the inexplicable disappearance of influenza globally, when it should have the same transmission characteris…

> when it should have the same transmission characteristics as corona virus. Corona might spread more rapidly, but it should spread in the same manner. That's just like not true. Different diseases spread differently. It seems like covid will spread better through smaller droplets for example. And even if it were you just said that covid spreads easier. Disease transmission isn't linear so if interventions were enoug…

> the health care system almost collapse in Italy, NYC, LA, and now India is still a huge deal.

This I can agree with. But our way of dealing with the problem hasn't solved that going forward whatsoever. Are we going to ignore the fact that NYC has been shutting down hospitals for decades[1]?

> Hugely more people are dying this year than do in an average year.

Not according to the numbers I've seen.

> People died, literally dies in all of these places because they weren't able to get into a hospital.

What are the death rates for people in hospitals compared to people dying with covid outside of hospitals? What interventions are hospitals providing to most patients that are conclusively saving their lives? At first, it was ventilators, but that has quietly become not recommend for most patients.

I happen to be close friends with someone that worked on the covid floor in a major regional hospital. Most people in the hospital were being treated for pneumonia, some of them were on supplemental oxygen. The hospital was never overrun, only a small portion was dedicated as a covid wing.

My friend never contracted covid, nor did anyone else they worked with.

1: https://indypendent.org/2014/04/nycs-vanishing-hospitals/

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#230

Post by akiselev » Thu, Apr 29, 2021, 6:54 PM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #212

akiselev wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. COVID might be so transmissible that the entire world has been exposed to it enough to trigger an immune response but only establishes itself and becomes an infection in those who get a large enough viral load over a short enough time period.

So light COVID exposure would produce enough of an immune response to trigger influenza immunity but not COVID immunity?

It wouldn't produce an immunity, it would just keep the innate immune response active enough to prevent the average small cluster of COVID or flu viruses from replicating and growing into a full blown infection. This wouldn't even give the adaptive immune system a chance to develop an immunity to either of them.

If someone went to the COVID or flu ward and had someone cough in their face, they'd still get infected because that kind of exposure is generally too much for the innate immune system to catch.