No flu season anywhere in the world this year ...

[Dustyboots]

Christina Pagel (alternative SAGE) has just said this on Newsnight. She says there's been no flu season anywhere in the world this year because of Covid restrictions etc

Does anyone else know whether this is the case?

She was suggesting that if we kept restrictions up we could eliminate Covid and in the future eliminate most things, therefore reducing deaths forever!

I think she's a bit potty.

How long do antibodies last, so 'flu doesn't overwhelm the NHS in general because of the 'flu jab and natural antibodies from catching it in the past. Now its been nearly 12 months with limited virus transfer does this mean that when covid restrictions are loosened the risk of a bad outbreak of 'flu increases?

NHS is geared up for flu season, and schedules elective work round expected admissions. It hasn't ever before needed to stop elective work across the board

This just isn’t true. Here’s the opener to that NYT article I linked:

At some emergency wards, patients wait more than 12 hours before they are tended to. Corridors are jammed with beds carrying frail and elderly patients waiting to be admitted to hospital wards. Outpatient appointments were canceled to free up staff members, and by Wednesday morning hospitals had been ordered to postpone nonurgent surgeries until the end of the month

So they did cancel non-urgent surgery across the board for the 2018 flu season. The difference is no one really cared or felt particularly alarmed (even though flu really does kill children and healthy young adults).

@Incyra

My guess is that influenza is not as contagious as covid, therefore the restrictions we have in place have helped flu not to spread?

This I think

Unfortunately I expect they will use this to make us wear hateful masks every winter

[quote Caneloalvarez]@AssassinatedBeauty as an emetophobe, the reduction of Norovirus is my one silver lining of Covid!!!

That and the fact that it will no longer be acceptable to struggle into work with a cough/cold... I used to catch 3 or 4 bad colds a year and it seems so grim now to think back on people spreading it at work. Many would struggle in just to "show their face" and prove they were really sick because of shitty employers![/quote]
My boss was the worst for this. He’d come in with a shitty cold and sneeze and cough all over the place and invariably within a few days it was all round the office. This happened 3/4 times a year.

The only way to stop covid is to stop transmission the more transmissions the more it mutates regardless if people are ok when they catch it if it mutates it could be very bad or it might mutate to not a serious disease I don’t know why the government don’t just say it so people can understand it better ! Flu has gone down because of basic hygiene masks and isolation and more uptake of flu vaccines 💉 x

PassionPeach - you're right.

Employees in many sectors will always have to struggle into work ill. Nurses, prison officers, teachers and doctors still will: no-one to cover them. Supermarket staff will: there are people to cover them (plenty of pt flexi staff on payroll) but employers too right to pay sick pay.

Office workers might wfh which is good at least in big cities where public transport dominates, if fewer sick people are on buses and tubes, and will help general community spread of flus and colds.

Too tight to pay them!

It is certainly interesting. I would like to know the reason but suspect it is a mixture of things already discussed on this thread

@BungleandGeorge

All kids up to and including year 7 and all vulnerable kids have been strongly encouraged to have the vaccine this year. It’s possible that has really inhibited spread in schools.

My DS has his at school every year except if I don't hand the form in time and have to go to a catch up clinic elsewhere and the update is normally pretty high.

This goes back to what happens with people in isolated jungle with no contact with others - as soon as even the smallest cold reaches them large numbers die as they do not have immunity from childhood etc. It is one reason we are saving sadly currently saving 90 year olds (not that that is a bad thing in itself) but in the process ensuring the current crop of our children do not have immunity and will not have the lives the 90 year olds will as the children will not the immunity they get from winters of coughs and colds.

Unfortunately I expect they will use this to make us wear hateful masks every winter

‘They’ aren’t even making us wear masks now so I doubt it.

It’s pretty easy to find an exemption to fit you if you really don’t want to wear a mask and there’s nobody officially enforcing it. Incidents of people being challenged in public are because there is a quantifiable risk which makes it a health and safety issue, once that risk is abated there’s no justification to challenge other people and it’s an individuals risk assessment.

Societal pressures are different and I agree it can be hard if you don’t wear one but if enough people informally agree with it then you can hardly declare you’re being made to do something.

I had flu this year!!

Tested twice for covid, wasn't that, had typical 'run over by a bus' symptoms (not cold like), one week in bed, one week feeling rubbish, all fine now.

I didn't have the flu jab as too lazy.

I'd rather have an annual bout of flu than continue to live like this.

I've had flu twice in my life and I believe I had covid, they are quite different. Flu was a worse experience, but I'm a 41 year old female without health issues, so obviously a different experience to others.

I would have thought that flu is much less contagious than covid and so distancing and hygiene has knocked it on the head. I expect if we keep up the current hygiene we would have far less flu and cold virus, I thought they both spread mostly through surface contact rather than aerosol which is how covid transmits.

@turnitonagain

I do hope now that remote working has been somewhat normalised this is the end of going to work with cold symptoms. I used to think it’s best to drag myself in and then leave midday if still feeling unwell. Last time I had flu I caught it at our office Christmas lunch from a colleague who’d just returned from a work trip overseas and said he had a sore throat midway through the meal

A lot of illnesses (chicken pox, covid, norovirus) are all contagious for a short period before symptoms present. While if you are coughing and sneezing loads, or vomitting, of course it is unsociable and unwise to mix with lots of people, but a sore throat could be anything or nothing. He might have thought the sore throat was due to aircon on the plane.

I am not so sure. I wear a mask which I find pretty awful and possibly am exempt - the exemption applies depending on how you feel in one. I wear it because it is on the whole the law and just about everyone wears one when I go shopping in the shop. However if the law changed to remove the mandatory face covering I will be whipping it off in a thrice. I might even ceremoniously burn the wretched thing.

@CrunchyCarrot

it's easy enough to imagine a Great Dane and a chihuahua are both dogs but they have very different characteristics in both the way they look and behave. Think of viruses like different breeds of dogs (or any analogy you like. It's enough to understand they are a different group)

I like it!

Actually, because influenza and covid aren't in the same family, or even phylum, it's more like they're both animals but one is a snake and the other is a sea slug.

RandomGrammarPun - Very true, but supermarket's tend to run on a bare bones skeleton crew now. For example, an entire shift of workers just got cut in my store. There are also whispers that till staff are next as we are getting rid of more manned checkouts and putting in more self-scans.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/14/is-covid-more-deadly-and-contagious-than-seasonal-flu

Lockdown, not just here but all over the world. Reduction in international travel, so less traffic from the southern hemisphere countries during their flu season. Increase in the uptake of the Flu vax in the UK. Social distancing/mask wearing/hand hygeine.

I don't think one single thing will be the out and out cause, probably a combination of the above.

Sorry to hear that, PassionPeach. I guess I was thinking of the model of large store, plenty of pt workers, especially students, who would happily do extra shifts to cover illness, but the employer still expects sick staff to work. I bet smaller stores have fewer staff all round and a more rigid rota with no flex.

Would we not have assumed this with hand washing higher uptake of flu vaccines etc? By the way loving that the first people on were people talking about overpopulation. Leave the viruses alone

Flu is still around and people have died from it. Only difference is they have been put down to death by Covid. Infact my neighbour who died of a cancelled operation has Covid on his death certificate even though he didn't have it. So many lies and misinformation spread and I do not know why. Its scary.

I think people have had flu, and they’ve died of it. But if they happened to have Covid at the same time, it was recorded as a Covid death. Don’t ask me why, but there has been pressure on medics from the outset to attribute deaths to Covid. I have first hand experience of this.

@xenia either you can wear one or you can’t, there’s no ‘possibly’ about it.

I worry for next year as we won’t know what to put in the flu vaccine.

I also worry about our immune systems, we do need to be exposed to mild illnesses and fight them off. Especially children and babies.

Add in all the anti bac stuff and constant hand sanitising....