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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

#291

Post by caturopath »

alpaca128 wrote: post #115
caturopath wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since this has varied so much by region, I wonder if there's any good evidence. This makes a lot of sense. Schools have been surprisingly rare causes of COVID outbreaks, but are constant epicenters for flu outbreaks.

> Schools have been surprisingly rare causes of COVID outbreaks I can clearly remember that multiple countries closed schools within weeks of the first reopening because the virus was spreading there like wildfire, in the age group with the highest rate of asymptomatic(aka invisible until it's too late) cases.

The CDC reports at https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br... that "in-person learning in schools has not been associated with substantial community transmission"

The low symptom rate corresponds to a low transmission rate. The worse your case of COVID, the more likely you will transmit it to others in the same situation. This is the obvious mechanism of the fact that kids, who very seldom have bad cases of COVID and so frequently do not show symptoms, are not usually major spreaders of the virus.

This all is one of the really unusual things about COVID compared to other communicable diseases.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#292

Post by meragrin_ »

matwood wrote: post #223
dnautics wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does testing positive for the flu rule out covid? What is to prevent someone from having both?

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#293

Post by graeme »

postalrat wrote: post #112

https://syndromictrends.com/metric/panel/rp/percent_positivi... Unless I'm reading that chart wrong it seems like flu went away but viruses that cause cold like symptoms stuck around. If masks/etc was super effective wouldn't you expect those to go down with influenza?

They didn’t vanish but it looks like multiple other viruses shrank.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#294

Post by timr »

joshgel wrote: post #284
timr wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This 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....Covid has an R0 in the vicinity of 2.5....In the meantime, public health measures like masking and distancing will work against both viruses....there's really no need for conspiracy theorizing. Assuming that this is due to "masking and distancing" and the small difference…

2 was published in Feb 2020, so not sure how helpful that is... 1 is not normalized data. It does not account for testing frequency. These percentages are of tests using BioFire. My hospital, for example, does not use BioFire to test for SARS-CoV-2 and so we end up running BioFire much, much less frequently than during a normal year. Anecdotally non-COVID respiratory infections in hospitalized patients have decreased…

> 2 was published in Feb 2020, so not sure how helpful that is...

It's a meta-analysis of many other papers. The estimates for the other ILIs have not changed significantly in 2020. Again, this is nitpicking that misses the forest for the trees: the differences in estimated R0 between these viruses is not so precise as to be useful for claiming the effectiveness of something like "masks and distancing".

> 1 is not normalized data. It does not account for testing frequency

This is incorrect. The data is normalized across all samples. Your hospital's non-participation may change the coverage of the sample, but that doesn't really matter when it's just showing you that rhinovirus hasn't gone away.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#295

Post by graeme »

taeric wrote: post #281
JulianMorrison wrote: post #269

Maybe we were too callous just allowing the ordinary flu to run rampant, and we should consider in future doing things like masking up when a flu season is expected, so as to stop the disease from killing thousands of old people. And also possibly consider going for full eradication rather than harm reduction. Can flu jabs be made more effective, and multi-strain, using mRNA vaccine technology? That's a genuinely new…

My money is on schools being a more active vector than makes sense. And I don't see us closing them like we did on a regular basis.

It would be sensible to improve school air quality: increase ventilation, install air purifiers, etc

That would reduce the spread of infectious diseases even with schools open as normal.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#296

Post by ceejayoz »

drummer wrote: post #254

Everyone with flu symptoms now gets diagnosed as having "COVID" based on an unreliable and questionable pcr test. It is all a scam.

"It's all a misdiagnosis and a scam" is trivially debunked. Anyone making this assertion is either incredibly misinformed or malicious.

The simplest way to debunk the idea is to look at total deaths, from all causes, in somewhere like the US.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

Again, total deaths. From any cause. A large spike is immediately obvious in the charting. https://imgur.com/a/cEhR0Eh

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#297

Post by WA »

gorbachev wrote: post #262

I was just commenting to a co-worker my entire family hasn't been sick since the pandemic started. That is very unusual for a family with young children. No flu, no stomach viruses, absolutely nothing for more than a year now. Thankfully no covid-19 either.

Kindergarten was open and closed here in Germany several times in the last 12 months. My kids both caught a cold several times within a week after reopening.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#298

Post by GavinMcG »

meragrin_ wrote: post #292
matwood wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How does testing positive for the flu rule out covid? What is to prevent someone from having both?

No idea on the technical answer, but the healthcare logistics answer is that because it's not all that likely, a positive flu test was a decent stand-in when COVID tests weren't widely available.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#299

Post by andreygrehov »

ceejayoz wrote: post #280
andreygrehov wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7680614/

Find a more credible source. https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-stanford-masks/fac... The author lied about his affiliation with Stanford, and the paper was retracted. > Jonathan Davis, a spokesperson for Elsevier, told Reuters via email that Medical Hypotheses has since retracted the article after concluding it was misleading due to “a broader review of existing scientific evidence” showing that masks “are an…

I didn't know the article was retracted. Are there credible papers confirming that masks do help?

Edit: also, quoting Reuters is fine. However, quoting Forbes is not. Forbes is a trash publication, getting published there costs a few hundred bucks.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#300

Post by aarondia »

gorbachev wrote: post #262

I was just commenting to a co-worker my entire family hasn't been sick since the pandemic started. That is very unusual for a family with young children. No flu, no stomach viruses, absolutely nothing for more than a year now. Thankfully no covid-19 either.

This year was a great experiment in person hygiene. It was the healthiest I have ever been for a full year, no colds, stomach bugs, anything.

I'm not sure which practices I'll continue, but its definitely shown me that I have wayyyy more control over my health than I previously thought.

Curious what others think are the most effective continued practices. Seems like social distancing isn't super reasonable, but maybe continuing to wear a mask in crowded places?

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