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Have you noticed that nobody seems to die of anything but COVID-19 any more? This is despite the fact that most people are actually dying of everything but the Wuhan plague. In fact, more than 99% of Australians and New Zealanders who have died so far this year have died of anything but COVID-19. Even in the US, 92% of Americans have died of not-COVID.
Have you also noticed that nobody seems to be getting the flu this year? Unlike the died-of-everything-but, this startling fact is not just an artefact of selective media/political hysteria. Data from around the world seems to indicate that 2020 is a remarkably flu-free year.
It was feared by many to be the perfect winter storm, a nightmare situation that would push our health service over the edge: the ‘twin-demic’ of flu, which kills about 10,000 Britons every year, and a second deadly wave of Covid-19.
Such was the concern that the Government rolled out the biggest flu vaccination programme in British history[…]
There’s just one curious problem: flu, it seems, has all but vanished.
The flu season came and went in the Southern Hemisphere with nary a sniffle.
In the Southern Hemisphere, where the flu season happens during our summer months, the WHO data suggests it never took off at all.
In Australia, just 14 positive flu cases were recorded in April, compared with 367 during the same month in 2019 – a 96 per cent drop.
By June, usually the peak of its flu season, there were none. In fact, Australia has not reported a positive case to the WHO since July.
This pattern is repeated across the Southern Hemisphere, from Chile to South Africa – flu rates plummeting by up to 99%. Data from the Northern Hemisphere suggests that the same phenomenon is repeating there.
So, what’s going on?
It may be a matter of not finding what you’re not looking for. Unlike the hysterically obsessive counting of COVID cases, patients, even those with flu symptoms, aren’t routinely tested. Instead, somewhat like opinion polling, a selection of clinics carry out routine flu testing and the results are extrapolated to the population at large. But, it must be noted, flu testing is only carried out on patients with flu symptoms, unlike the expansive testing of even asymptomatic people for signs of COVID.
It should also be borne in mind that the symptoms of COVID and the flu are often remarkably similar.
Another compelling explanation suggests the presence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19 and has run rampant throughout the world, has somehow ‘crowded out’ the flu virus[…]
When an individual is infected with one virus, they are less likely to be infected by another during that time due to something called ‘viral interference’.
Virus expert Professor James Stewart, at the University of Liverpool, says: ‘Immune system cells come in and help destroy the first infection, and if another virus comes along that same response will fight it off.’
Dr Elisabetta Groppelli adds: ‘Viruses are parasites. Once they enter a cell, they don’t want other viruses to compete with. So the virus already in the body will effectively kick the other parasite out.’
This theory is somewhat supported by evidence that people already infected with cold and viruses were significantly less likely to be infected with previous pandemic viruses like H1N1, SARS and MERS. But it’s not clear that the reverse – the ’Rona knocking out flu virus – applies. Indeed, the relatively low rate of COVID-19 infections in places like Australia are nowhere near enough to explain the dramatic fall in the flu.
Instead, scientists overwhelmingly agree the decline is far more likely to be linked to interventions – social distancing, hand-washing, lockdowns and school and shop closures.
‘If coronavirus interfered with anything, it was our behaviour,’ says Dr Ellen Foxman.
Anecdotally, this theory tallies with my personal experience. I’ve had not so much as a sniffle through the Tasmanian winter. Writing being a typically solitary vice, my social interactions have been as sparse as ever, but I have finally taken the advice my other half, an aged-care worker, has always urged: rigorous hand hygiene in public. Like most people in Tasmania, I’ve not worn a mask once. It seems that simply squirting on the hand cleanser after touching public surfaces is enough to work health wonders.
On the downside, there is also the suggestion that the the dramatic decline in colds and flu may have left populations more vulnerable to the Wu ’Flu.
As other, milder viruses, such as the flu or common cold, stop circulating as freely, some believe we could have less protection against the more dangerous coronavirus.
Dr Foxman says: ‘Common colds probably shore up our defences against other viruses. If we completely shut down transmission of these with lockdown measures, and then open things up again, will we see bigger peaks of coronavirus and other viruses?
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