Don't know why you're downvoted; this is true. You can personally avoid opportunities for exposure all you want, but your 2-8ish year old kids will get colds regularly from daycare/school, and then will give them to you. I also didn't get sick from March-September 2020. Then schools re-opened here, and I was sick within 3 weeks, and then again a couple months later. And that's even with all the extra sanatization and…
don't forget that kids get sick for like 12 hours and you're knocked out for several days.
The likely explanation is that, because the flu is significantly less transmissible than COVID, even states with "no restrictions" were able to knock it out because enough people took enough measures to protect themselves from airborne/surface communicable disease in general. In other words, you can probably beat back the flu significantly by having enough of the population mask up, wash/sanitize their hands, etc.
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?
Some of those "flu" pandemics may not have been caused by influenza viruses.
You can do a LOT. I haven't been sick once in 6+ years because I do the following: 1) Almost never eat out. Home cooked meals that I've prepped / washed. This was single handedly the biggest factor that completely removed "getting sick" from my life. 2) Hand wash before touching face, or food. 3) Avoid sick people. If I hear someone coughing or sneezing, I move away from them. Call me a germ freak, I don't care, I've…
> Almost never eat out. Home cooked meals that I've prepped / washed. This was single handedly the biggest factor that completely removed "getting sick" from my life. I highly doubt this is the case. And in any event, how would you know?
We were warned of bad outcomes if precautions weren't taken. Precautions were taken, and the worst outcomes were avoided. This doesn't invalidate the prior warning. I don't want to assume bad intentions on your part but I'm not really sure what you want us to conclude from these posts... elaborate?
That it wasn't predictable or obvious flu cases would go to near zero. These news stories are not about how if we do X then flu cases will go to near zero, and most operate under the assumption flu season is coming and will likely be a "twindemic" that needs to be mitigated/lessened. It didn't come and now we are pretending it was clear it was never coming. Just tired of people using selective memories to pretend tha…
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…
> Can flu jabs be made more effective, and multi-strain, using mRNA vaccine technology? That's a genuinely new tool in the toolbox.
In theory, yes; in practice, I don't see this happening for some time (outside of a possible combined SARS-CoV-2 booster + flu combo). The mRNA vaccines are expensive to produce, and it's hard to justify a cost multiplier that's a magnitude higher & harder to produce. Flu vaccines are already multi-strain, and the current techniques already attempt to generate the recombinant strains that might be generated in the wild. Flu mutates faster than the current egg based vaccine production pipeline can handle, and the mRNA vaccine pipeline is orders of magnitude smaller in scale. This will change, of course.
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…
I wouldn't be surprised if there was more flu testing this year. I've never intentionally taking a flu test, but some of my COVID tests also screened for influenza a/b at the same time.
Given the rather low mortality rate for the flu, I think implementing more regulations in our lives isn't a good idea. Bureaucratic creep is a serious issue, and this sort of thing could be a gateway to regulating more aspects of life down the road. Educating people and encouraging them to wear masks 100%, but let's not start mandating anything new, or levying new fines that we have already seen be disproportionately…
The comment you're replying to never mentioned regulations or any governmental intervention.
Ah, so, eliminating the flu with internet memes and a McDonald's ad campaign or whatever?
There's no scenario where eradication is realistic without involving government.
Diseases have no trouble spreading through ordinary intimate social interactions with friends and family. In fact, you're far more likely to get sick from someone you are close to and spend hours with than someone you just pass by in a retail store. Lockdowns and mask policy are not neatly correlated with lower infection rates or death counts. Simple counterfactual example is Florida vs. California. Same results, vas…
Unless of course you look at the city level, where different policies and different levels of compliance correlate quite clearly with cases: look at San Francisco or San Jose compared to Miami or Los Angeles.
Not at all, you can cherry pick cities and that proves nothing, they all have vastly different demographics, different density, different climates, etc. For example, New York City is one of the worst performing metros on the planet despite harsh restrictions (and high compliance) at the city and state level and in neighboring states. There's no discernible pattern in the data.
You can do a LOT. I haven't been sick once in 6+ years because I do the following: 1) Almost never eat out. Home cooked meals that I've prepped / washed. This was single handedly the biggest factor that completely removed "getting sick" from my life. 2) Hand wash before touching face, or food. 3) Avoid sick people. If I hear someone coughing or sneezing, I move away from them. Call me a germ freak, I don't care, I've…
I don't think your anecdata proves anything but your own experience. 1. I eat out a lot, including junk food every now and then. 2. Of course I hand wash, but i would not say "before touching face" per-se, but as often as you'd normally expect (restroom breaks, before preparing food and/or eating, after coming from outside). 3. I don't really run away from sick people. I simply am indifferent. I still never get sick,…
I've worked a variety of jobs. I tend to a lot of mild upper respiratory infections I recover from easily enough.
The only things I could ever really link were routine public transit use. Or when I worked in a bar. When those were true I got sick a lot more than when they weren't.
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?
Each virus can only interact with certain cells of your body. COVID and influenza interact with lower respiratory cells. You have to inhale a viral load to be infected, or at least this is the consensus belief right now (and is contrary to all of the concern about fomites early on). Many cold-like viruses infect mucous membranes (you have a number over your body). A glancing touch is enough to be infected.
Do you have a reference for this? My SO still insists on washing our shopping, which, according to your information is totally unnecessary.