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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

#411

Post by jtolmar »

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?

Say 1 in 10 people have flu and 1 in 10 have covid. In a population of 100, 9 have just flu, 9 have just covid, and 1 has both. Those 19 people present similar symptoms, and anyone among them has roughly a 53% chance of having each disease. They take a flu test and it comes up positive. Now they're either one of the 9 with just flu, or the one unlucky person with both, so there's only a 10% chance they have covid.

The impact of this effect changes if has-flu and has-covid are correlated, but it's still there unless it's a 100% correlation.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#412

Post by papito »

kat wrote: post #383
bosswipe wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have data but my hunch is that being a germophobe leads to worse long term health outcomes. Your immune system needs the exercise.

There is also a whole host of mental illness that are triggered by physical immune responses. Eating disorders that stem from one bad diarrhea episode are a really common example of this. Both ends of this spectrum can result in bad mental health. Both ends of this spectrum can also result in physicals health issues too. Get a stomach bug and end up with post-infections IBS. On the other hand, stress from fear of ger…

Sanitizing your hands every five minutes is obviously a disorder, but I don't understand why on HN the downvote army is triggered by suggesting that you should have clean hands before eating food.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#413

Post by bumbada »

admeyer wrote: post #388

When I get the flu I don't report it to flu trackers. Rarely have I ever told my doctor. Is this uncommon?

It is the most common thing to do. What happens is a small percentage of flu cases get complications and need to go to the doctor, like for example you get it with other virus and your immune system overreacts.

This is the reason doctors know flu is not present, because they are not getting those cases they got every year in Winter.

Flu is the main medical issue in Autumn-Winter in most of the North hemisphere by quantity.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#414

Post by tripletao »

silicon2401 wrote: post #368
tripletao wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kary Mullis also doubts that HIV causes AIDS, believes in astrology, and once saw a fluorescent talking raccoon. Clearly a brilliant guy, but not someone whose advice should directly determine clinical practice. https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/technology-history/man-who... See my other comment here for the reasons why I believe almost all SARS-CoV-2 PCR positives are true positives (as to whether the patient is or…

That's an ad-hominem argument. You might as well say Isaac Newton also believed in astrology, so we should throw out all his work on math and physics. As a non-religious person, astrology and religion are no different to me, so then you might as well throw out any knowledge innovated by like 99% of people who have ever lived. I have no stake or attachment to Kary Mullis, whether he's wrong or right is irrelevant to m…

> That's an ad-hominem argument.

And yours was an argument from authority. You gave no explanation of or support for Mullis's arguments, and you gave no reason to believe his conclusion except a positive aspect of his reputation (i.e., his discovery of PCR in the first place).

In that case, negative aspects of his reputation (i.e., the fluorescent raccoon; or, closer to the domain in question, his belief on HIV and AIDS) are surely also relevant. They don't mean what he's saying is false, but they'd cause a reasonable person to approach his unsupported statements with more care.

For convenience, I'm linking my other comment below. This is a detailed explanation of why I believe almost all patients who test positive by PCR are (or were very recently) infected with SARS-CoV-2, fully referenced. It has so far received zero interaction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26984429

If you think I'm wrong, please explain why, and I'll reply. If you think I'm right, then I'd also appreciate a reply. The belief that coronavirus cases are grossly over-diagnosed is a common element of claims that no precautions against it are necessary, which cause real harm; so I hope you don't want to falsely spread that belief.

ETA: And for completeness, here's a paper discussing the ability to culture virus from PCR-positive samples. I believe that's the real point Mullis was alluding to in his comments, that people who test PCR positive aren't necessarily shedding replication-competent virus; but that's a separate question from whether they are (or very recently were) infected.

https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid...

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#415

Post by timr »

joshgel wrote: post #398
timr wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 no…

In the paper associated with 1 it says: The FilmArray RP test utilization rate (TUR) metric is defined as the non-normalized number of RP patient test results generated each week across the Trend sites (computed as a centered 3-week moving average). To calculate the pathogen detection rate (as displayed in Figure 2 [second data view] and on the Trend website), we compute the rate for each organism at each institution…

The TUR is not the metric plotted on the website. Read the very next sentence in the section you're quoting:

> To calculate the pathogen detection rate (as displayed in Figure 2 [second data view] and on the Trend website), we compute the rate for each organism at each institution as a centered 3-week moving average. To adjust for the capacity differences between sites, a national aggregate is calculated as the unweighted average of individual site rates. Only data from sites contributing more than 30 tests per week is included to avoid noise from small numbers of tests. Because the calculation of pathogen detection rate includes results from patients with multiple detections, the detection rate for all organisms can, in theory, add up to greater than one. In practice, this does not occur.

The TUR is the the raw number of hits across all sites. They normalize this, which is why they talk about it possibly exceeding 1.0. It's why the Y-axis of the plot is labeled in percentages. The height of the bars is a moving average of detection rates across their network.

Regardless, this is still nitpicking. The point was that these other pathogens have not gone away. They have not. Even if you were right, it wouldn't change the argument.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#416

Post by psychlops »

fallingfrog wrote: post #403
Majromax wrote: post #237

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 ( 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…

I actually told people at the outset of the covid lockdowns, “at least we won’t have a flu season this year.” Then later on I saw people online floating this as some kind of conspiracy and I thought, “wait, this wasn’t obvious to everyone?”

Covid was this years flu season.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#417

Post by f6v »

bombcar wrote: post #267
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.

I suspect a significant reduction of flu vectors is simply closed schools.

Where I live parents don’t understand what a lockdown is. During extended school holidays the children are all playing together. What’s the point then?

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#418

Post by cavejay »

shoto_io wrote: post #241

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.

With Australia being effectively Covid free we've already started to see much stronger cases of the flu.

Local doctors in my City (Canberra) told multiple people I've talked with that the extra protective steps taken last year meant our bodies weren't as well positioned to handle the standard flu when we caught it.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#419

Post by collyw »

ancientworldnow wrote: post #22
georgeplusplus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flu - a coronavirus that has been wiped out because of social distance and masking and hygiene controls Covid - a coronavirus that is absolutely rampant because insufficient masking, distancing, and hygiene controls How you rationalize that hypocrisy so easily in your head is beyond me.

Flu is an influenza virus not a coronavirus - it's literally in the name. Additionally, varying levels of contagiousness and mechanisms of spread absolutely make actions more effective for some diseases and less effective or not effective at all for others. This is not a controversial statement despite your dramatic insistence on ignorance.

Similar sized virus, respiratory and seasonal. Plenty of similarities.

Re: Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic

#420

Post by timr »

thelean12 wrote: post #361
timr wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are reasonable theories as well. Though the second one would really have to be "SARS-CoV2 has more fomite spread than flu" to explain the observations. In general though, any sort of explanation that focuses on differences in transmission is more plausible than hand-wavy theories involving R0 and masks. People just desperately want to find evidence that the stuff we did this year made a huge difference.

> People just desperately want to find evidence that the stuff we did this year made a huge difference. I don't think that's true at all. People have been receptive to the increased evidence that transmission on surfaces is pretty unlikely, for example, despite all the efforts we've put into sanitizing surfaces. I think most people can appreciate that all the shit we threw at the wall throughout the pandemic eventual…

To be clear: I'm not making a specific argument about masks vs. sanitizing vs. whatever here.

I'm just saying: responses like the OP immediately leap to the conclusion that influenza went away because of all the stuff we did. It's an error in logic, driven by the emotional desire to believe that the stuff we did must have had a serious impact, and that anything else is not worth serious discussion.

That's ideology, not science.

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