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One of the apparently remarkable things about the pandemic was that influenza supposedly all-but disappeared.
The official reason is that the novel and deadly SARS-CoV-2 virus ‘outcompeted’ flu and replaced it as a primary cause of death during that time.
Obviously, then, it was a triumph of pandemic lockdown policy!
Or was it?
Because we know perfectly well that lockdowns did little to prevent Covid, so it seems logically impossible that they should have stopped another respiratory virus. If Covid was a tricky little virus, then flu would have to be more cunning than a fox who used to be Professor of Cunning at Oxford University but has moved on, and is now working for the UN at the High Commission of International Cunning Planning.
The likely answer is almost certainly more prosaic: few flu cases were reported, because no-one was looking for them.
There appears to have been a collective and systemic failure in flu surveillance and flu death reporting systems in the UK during 2020 and into 2021. Thus, it is possible that the failure to detect and report flu (and deaths recorded as due to it) may better explain the mystery of vanishing flu rather than viral interference from SARS-Cov-2.
There is in fact good reason to suspect that the Covid pandemic, bad as it was, was nowhere near as unique or devastating, in terms of death and illness from the virus (rather than appalling public policy), as we are told. Death tolls were certainly exaggerated by counting methods such as citing every death within two weeks of a positive Covid test as a “Covid death” (a method which, at its most ludicrous, included gunshots and motor crashes as “Covid deaths”).
The accuracy of testing methods has also been questioned, but, regardless, mass testing for Covid has been almost unique in modern public health. Influenza has never been tested for in the same way. Past pandemics were not subject to mass testing, either.
And seasonal flu?
A mix of surveillance systems consistently reported on flu before 2020 and continued to have some role to play post-spring 2020 until flu returned at the end of 2021. In the UK, flu surveillance is performed via clinical surveillance by primary care (based on networks of GPs), the FluDetector and the FluSurvey systems.
What about machine learning, though? Famously, Google poured their Big Data resources into predicting the 2008-9 flu season. It was the most hilarious failure since “Dewey Beats Truman”.
Credence has been given to the idea of tracking pandemics using machine learning via Google Trends data, the UK’s FluDetector system being one such system. FluDetector reported that flu disappeared in 2020/21, yet this is totally at odds with Google’s own data and UKHSA reports, both of which report a clear signal for flu in the UK in 2020/21.
Dedicated flu survey systems were also simply repurposed to look for Covid and ignore flu altogether.
The UK FluSurvey system was originally conceived to survey a panel of self-selecting participants for signs and symptoms of influenza-like illnesses (ILIs). In March 2020 it was repurposed to cover both Covid-19 and flu symptoms, and the routine questionnaire was adapted to capture Covid-19 specific information. The FluSurvey system tracked ILI incidence only until week 20 of 2020, and never updated this data.
The UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) also stopped looking.
The 2020 statistics for England and Wales exclude any report on influenza and pneumonia deaths, and instead are wholly focused on deaths ‘involving’ Covid-19. In contrast, their 2021 statistics report on influenza and pneumonia deaths, starting on January 8. So, for 2020 any reporting of flu deaths was completely abandoned in favour of Covid-19 reports, and flu is included only in surveillance reports from 2021, thus giving the impression flu had disappeared in the intervening period.
In response to a freedom of information request about flu in 2020 the ONS obfuscated its answer by using a different death code, ‘respiratory disease’ rather than flu, for the period up to May 2020, and may have done so to hide the deaths that should have been attributed to flu. This FoI request shows that there were 2,287 flu deaths in March 2020, which is not greatly different from the 3,324 Covid-19 deaths that same month; yet SARS-CoV-2 was considered to be a significantly greater threat to public health. Furthermore, in January 2021 the ONS reported that there were almost as many deaths involving flu (5,719) as there were involving Ccovid-19 (7,610), yet for only 5.2 per cent of these flu deaths was flu recorded as the underlying cause of death.
In fact, there is good reason to suppose that flu not only never went away at all, but was just as bad as ever.
Data for pneumonia and flu deaths can be extracted from the UK NOMIS (official census and labour market statistics) system. When we queried this system, we were quite shocked to find that it returns 20,130 influenza and pneumonia deaths for 2020, at a rate consistent with previous years (eg 26,342 in 2019). The presence of flu deaths in 2020 in the UK is repeated elsewhere. In the US, influenza and pneumonia numbers are similar in 2020 to previous years, as reported by the CDC, with 53,544 deaths in 2020 compared with between approximately 50-60k deaths in each year from 2015 to 2019.
The Conservative Woman
Just don’t bother asking the WHO. It’s “FluNet” dutifully shows almost no flu in the UK or US for 2020/21.
Which further begs the question: if we know that authorities have deliberately suppressed flu numbers, what’s to have stopped them deliberately inflating Covid numbers? How, indeed, are we supposed to trust anything they tell us?
