on NPR recently, tuberculosis [ TB ] rates will likely increase for years and years VS had covid19 not made its appearance.
Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
231–240 of 821 posts
Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
There's lots and lots of samples being tested for flu. Is the theory then that there is some bias where the hidden cases don't get tested for flu at all and only mistakes are sent for testing?
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm
It says right on the page that Covid makes the data difficult to interpret, the thing I'm pointing to is the 900,000 samples tested.
Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
#233If 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.
Genuinely curious; what kind of math are they using to stock shovels in hardware stores? I've never heard that before but it sounds interesting.
Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
#234Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you had flu symptoms, are you not going to go get a covid test?
I'm not OP but no, I work from home and only see the people I live with since this started. Knowing if its covid vs the flu wouldn't really matter much to me and either way my behavior would be the same. Frankly it would be worse for public health if I left the house while sick to satisfy my curiosity. I can imagine that many others in my situation would come to a similar conclusion.
Do the people you live with also work from home and never go out?
Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
#236An 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…
With a lot of people getting tested for COVID "just in case" and hypochondriacs constantly checking in with their doctors, I'd guess that the percent of flu cases tallied might actually be a little bit higher than usual due to COVID
Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
#237This should not come as a surprise, and it was largely predictable from the outset.
The flu has a base reproduction number (R0) less than 2 (https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/coronavirus/2020/12/07/covid-19...). Covid has an R0 in the vicinity of 2.5 (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...).
In the meantime, public health measures like masking and distancing will work against both viruses. If people become reluctant to socialize because of covid (whether or not there be legal restrictions), they will also not spread the flu.
As a broad conclusion, if public health measures reduce the effective reproduction number of Covid to about 1 (stabilizing exponential growth), they will also reduce the effective reproduction number of the flu to something substantially below 1. Since the flu would have also had a low baseline prevalence in the summer of 2020, it is no wonder that we failed to see a flu season.
There's really no need for conspiracy theorizing.
Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
#238[deleted]
Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
#239Earlier 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?
Don't know how widespread it was, but for my wife who had bi-weekly Covid tests for work they also started testing the samples simultaneously for the flu.
Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
You realize those « deep cleans » are mostly comms operations for governments to look like they are doing stuff, right? Virus live (mostly) in people, not on sidewalks. One of the most ridiculous example: the Thai government went to the extent of spraying disinfectant in the forest next to the Burmese border, and got pictures published in newspaper to show their great work. Comical! [1] [1] https://twitter.com/thaine…
> 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?
sunlight already good at kill virus, this have been knowen for many year. study find corona is dead from twenty minute sunlight alone: https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/inf...
so maybe not so efective.