What will this flu season be like?

Last season, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, flu cases were virtually non-existent.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of experts, officials and doctors did not see this coming. Many have openly expressed concerns of a possible ‘twindemia’, where the flu and COVID-19 would cause an even worse public health crisis.

There is no exact explanation as to why influenza cases were so low, but the implementation of preventive measures such as masking and social distancing, combined with a lack of international travel, includes is surely for something.

However, this next flu season will see far fewer restrictions in place and world travel will begin again.

This leaves a lot of people wondering how this will impact the upcoming flu season.

Contagion recently met with William Schaffner, MD, medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases (NFID), to discuss what we may see in the coming months.

“I’m worried again that we have ‘twindemia’,” Schaffner said. “We will have COVID being transmitted, we will have the flu transmitted and I think we will do a lot of testing, to try to sort the two from each other as we take care of the patients.”