If I remember correctly, Prof. Drosten speculated about a heavy cold and flu season coming winter because we basically skipped one season.
Remains to be seen I guess, but this prognosis resonated with me.
Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
241–250 of 821 posts
Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
#242Earlier 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?
I went to the hospital a few months ago for something that could have been covid-19 and they did test the various influenza strains as well as the covid one. Not sure how representative that is though. I don't think the covid-19 swab or gurgle tests automatically test for the flu as well.
Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
#243This 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.
Just because you weren’t tested for the flu at your local doctor’s office, that doesn’t mean that the flu isn’t systematically monitored or that infection rates haven’t plummeted.
The headline is hyperbolic (the article says it’s dropped to “minuscule levels”) but it’s entirely possible to determine that by sampling a small portion of the population.
Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I think this was only a problem with the HIV adenovirus vaccines.
Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
#245Hopefully this won't cause selective pressure on flu viruses to become more aggressive.
Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
#246If 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.
I don't know where you live but in Canada we have programs like FluWatchers which send sample groups a survey every week asking about flu-like symptoms, flu vaccinations (and COVID now) and such every flu season. They can also request a voluntary sample from you to help track these things. So the data is there :-)
In the USA, we have a few organizations that try to keep track of the flu. I think they are mostly private companies pushing drug ads though.
Before covid hospitals, and doctors, didn't test for the flu viruses. Maybe in severe cases?
I know for certain private practice doctors didn't. All you saw was a chart on the wall differentiating a cold, from the flu.
In the USA, the government tries to target the upcoming flu vaccine, but is usually wrong on the strain.
Personally, I think Americans have been dying for years of SAR viruses, and the government has been blaming the flu virus?
We had a family Thanksgiving in my grandmother's house in '98. My sister brought her two very sick kids to the holliday. By the next morning (12-16 hrs after exposure) we were all sick, with the exception of my brother. 5 people who never felt so sick in their lives. I could't even muster the energy to take my slacks off before dropping into bed. 7 days later my grandmother died. I was always under the impression the incubation period was longer than a half day? Whatever that virus was, I will never forget it for a lot of reasons. And of course, my grandmothers cause of death was "complications of the flu", and probally should have been on a respirator, and not sent home so soon?
Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
#247While I think this is most likely due to masking, distancing and staying home when sick, which were all far more effective against the flu than against SARS-CoV-2, I wonder how much this was affected by some of the deep cleans that cities were doing at the beginning of the pandemic where they basically sprayed entire cities with disinfectant trucks. Does anyone with more expertise have any thoughts about that?
Most likely due to people staying at home. I don't believe a mask can in any way protect one from catching a virus [1].
Edit: if you downvote, please, comment why. I could be wrong, so would love to know your arguments.
Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
#248While I think this is most likely due to masking, distancing and staying home when sick, which were all far more effective against the flu than against SARS-CoV-2, I wonder how much this was affected by some of the deep cleans that cities were doing at the beginning of the pandemic where they basically sprayed entire cities with disinfectant trucks. Does anyone with more expertise have any thoughts about that?
In this 2018 paper[1] transmission from surfaces accounted for ~4% of flu infections. So it probably made very little impact. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6121424/
Thanks! This is good information. I would imagine that ~4% less flu infections at the start of a flu season would be enough to slow down the season a bit, in theory, but not to the point flu has been slowed down now.
Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the flu has always been here, even when our country was significantly less populated, when we were significantly more rural, and when people were significantly less connected in many ways. Like, how did we get flu pandemics in the 1700s? Weren't we less connected back then, even after you account for all the social distancing that was done this year?
The flu (influenza) has been linked to solar radiation and electricity. -- quote -- In 2001, Canadian astronomer Ken Tapping showed that the influenza pandemics over the previous three centuries correlated with peaks in solar magnetic activity, on an 11- year cycle. It has also been found that some outbreaks of influenza spread over enormous areas in just a few days – a fact that is difficult to explain by contagion…
5gexposed.com is not really a reputable source. Anyway,
> Also, numerous experiments seeking to prove direct contagion through close contact, droplets of mucus or other processes have proved fruitless.
> From 1933 to the present day, virologists have been unable to present any experimental study proving that influenza spreads through normal contact between people. All attempts to do so have met with failure.
This is just demonstrably false. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3682679/
Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. The only result from covid testing it delaying your own civil liberties. The vast vast majority of people wont ever get covid and a tiny remainder will have symptoms, an even smaller number will need to go to bed, a smaller number will need to go to hospital and people who were going to die this year may die from it. Dont take my word for it, this is the opinion of the UKs chief medical officer: https://www.…
> May 2020
(For context: about a week before their first wave of deaths. Oops.)