What Is The New Flu Going Around – Masks and other COVID-19 safety measures have kept flu cases down over the past 2 seasons. But the coming months could be very different.
There’s a saying among flu experts: “If you’ve seen flu season, you’ve seen flu season,” says Pritish Tosh, an infectious disease specialist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “I’ve been studying influenza for over a decade, looking at internal data, external data, public health trends, and I’m amazed at what influenza does every year,” he says.
What Is The New Flu Going Around
Given these trends, infectious disease experts are cautious about making predictions about future flu seasons. But Dr. Tosh and others note that if recent history is any indication, the U.S. After two years of fewer cases, one can expect increased flu activity.
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Read on to learn more about what to expect in the coming months and what you can do to fight the flu.
Over the past two seasons, flu rates have been low due to COVID-19 precautions. But this flu season, many of those protections have disappeared. Purvi S., MD, of NYU Langone Health. The test explains the risk.
The previous 2019-2020 flu season was considered mild, with about 35 million people in the United States contracting the flu. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), this led to 380,000 hospitalizations and 20,000 deaths.
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But once Covid-19 began to hit the United States in the spring of 2020, the flu essentially disappeared. “That was the beginning of some preventive behavioral changes, like people staying away from crowded places, people moving away from each other, things like that,” Tosh says. “Cases of influenza dropped – like they fell off a cliff.”
In the 2020-2021 flu season, the CDC reported only 2,038 cases of the flu and an estimated 700 deaths from flu complications.
Tosh says the 2021-2022 flu season was another weird one. As COVID-19 restrictions continued to be lifted and more people took off their masks, huddled indoors and otherwise returned to “normal” lives, the flu began to spread again.
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The CDC estimates that 8 to 13 million people will get sick with the flu during the 2021-2022 flu season, with a surprising spike in cases in March and April 2022 — the first time since 1982 that the flu peaked so late. Lynette Bramer, MPH, director of the CDC’s Domestic Influenza Surveillance Team, said in an interview with NBC News. The CDC notes that flu season usually peaks between December and February.
“Overall, the number of hospitalizations was lower than what we’ve typically seen in previous years [pre-pandemic], but we’re certainly not used to this period,” says Tosh.
While there are currently very few COVID-19 restrictions in the United States or around the world, infectious disease experts are seeing evidence that the flu is making a comeback.
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As the United States and the rest of the Northern Hemisphere forecast, scientists are looking at flu trends in the Southern Hemisphere, where flu season starts six months earlier. “It’s not always an accurate forecast for our season, but if the same flu strains are prevalent, things look pretty much the same,” Tosh says.
This summer, the World Health Organization (WHO) noted an increase in influenza activity in some areas of the Southern Hemisphere, particularly in temperate areas such as South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
This July, during Australia’s winter, flu cases exceeded pre-pandemic rates and the Australian Department of Health and Aged Care said the number of cases per week exceeded the country’s five-year average.
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In addition to the higher rates, Australian metrics showed that the flu season in April started about two months earlier than usual, but ended slightly earlier than normally expected. Is flu season starting early in the US too? “It’s still hard to predict,” Tosh says.
While no one wants to get the flu, it can be a problem if you haven’t been exposed to the virus in the past two flu seasons.
Before the pandemic, about 10 percent of the U.S. population would get the flu in a typical flu season, Tosh said. “These people will have a boost in their immune system, and then the population’s immune system will recover,” he says — meaning the entire community will benefit from additional immunity, including those who never had the flu.
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Even those who are exposed to the flu but don’t get sick benefit because their immune systems produce antibodies that “remember” the virus and attack it.
“Because the last few flu seasons have been so mild, the result could be a decline in the population’s flu immunity, leading to worse flu seasons, but it’s hard to say how that will play out,” Tosh says. .
The Covid-19 pandemic has had a lasting impact on some people’s behavior and attitudes, and this may be to our collective advantage in the fight against the flu. “For example, while many people have returned to in-person work, more people will be working from home than before the pandemic,” Tosh says.
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According to a February 2022 Pew Research poll, while 60 percent of American workers have jobs that require them to leave home, those who have the option to work from home often continue to do so, at least some of the time. New workplaces allow employees to work from home.
“We’re also seeing that fewer people choose to work when they’re sick, which is a good thing,” Tosh says. Before the pandemic, it was considered a “badge of honor” to show up to work with a cold or other contagious illness, but now if you do, you’ll be shunned by your co-workers.
“I think there will be fewer patients showing up to work because the social pressures are different, and that change will probably take a long time,” Tosh says.
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The WHO and the CDC analyze a variety of data, including which flu viruses circulate in different parts of the world at different times, to determine which strains to include in the flu vaccine.
In the 2020-2021 season, the lack of flu strains made this task especially difficult, and last year’s flu vaccine was not a good match for the virus, Tosh says. CDC data shows that it only reduces a person’s chance of getting a mild case of the flu by 16 percent. According to the CDC, the flu shot typically provides 40 to 60 percent protection against infection, but it can still reduce the risk of serious illness and hospitalization.
This year, the strain circulating in the southern hemisphere was a good match for the vaccine, Tosh says. “It doesn’t automatically predict a good game in the northern hemisphere, but it’s a good sign,” he adds.
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The best protection against the flu is a flu shot, says Tosh. “Sometimes we forget that in a typical flu year, tens of thousands of Americans die from the flu, and most of those are serious complications that can often be prevented by vaccination,” he says.
“I hope we have learned from Covid that even if you are infected with the vaccine, the severity of the disease is reduced. “Getting a flu shot reduces the risk of hospitalization and death from the flu, especially in high-risk people,” says Tosh. According to the CDC, the elderly, people with certain medical conditions, and young children are at increased risk of complications from the flu.
Besides getting a flu shot, there are other ways to protect yourself from the flu. The CDC recommends preventative measures to prevent the spread of germs, including:
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