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February is usually the peak of flu season, with doctors’ offices and hospitals packed with suffering patients. But not this year.
The flu has all but disappeared from the United States, with reports reaching levels far below anything seen in decades.
Experts say the measures put in place to fend off the coronavirus – mask wearing, social distancing and virtual schooling – have been an important factor in preventing a dreaded flu and COVID-19 ‘twindemic’. An effort to get more people vaccinated against the flu has probably helped too, as have fewer travelers, they say.
Another possible explanation: the coronavirus has mainly muscle the flu and other insects more common in autumn and winter. Scientists don’t fully understand the mechanism behind this, but it would be consistent with the patterns seen when certain strains of influenza predominate over others, said Dr. Arnold Monto, an influenza expert at the University of Michigan.
Nationally, “this is the lowest flu season we’ve ever seen,” according to a surveillance system roughly 25 years old, said Lynnette Brammer of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention .
Hospitals say the usual steady flow of flu patients never materialized.
At Maine Medical Center in Portland, the state’s largest hospital, “I haven’t seen any documented cases of the flu this winter,” said Dr. Nate Mick, chief of the emergency department.
Ditto in the capital of Oregon, where outpatient respiratory clinics affiliated with Salem Hospital have seen no confirmed cases of influenza.
“It’s wonderful,” said Dr. Michelle Rasmussen of the health system.
The numbers are astounding given that influenza has long been the country’s greatest infectious disease threat. In recent years, he has been accused of 600,000 to 800,000 annual hospitalizations and 50,000 to 60,000 deaths.
Around the world, influenza activity has been at very low levels in China, Europe and elsewhere in the northern hemisphere. And this follows reports of the small flu in South Africa, Australia and other countries during the southern hemisphere’s winter months, May through August.
The story was of course different with COVID-19, which killed more than 500,000 people in the United States. Coronavirus cases and deaths hit new highs in December and January before starting a recent decline.
However, flu-related hospitalizations are only a small fraction of their normal level even during a very mild season, said Brammer, who oversees CDC monitoring of the virus.
Flu death data for the entire U.S. population is difficult to compile quickly, but CDC officials keep a running count of child deaths. One pediatric flu death has been reported so far this season, up from 92 at the same time during the flu season last year.
“Many parents will tell you that this year their kids have been as healthy as they’ve ever been because they’re not swimming in the germ pool at school or daycare like they are. were the previous years, ”said Mick.
Some doctors say they’ve even stopped sending samples for testing because they don’t think the flu is present. Nonetheless, many labs use a “multiplex test” developed by the CDC that checks samples for both coronavirus and influenza, Brammer said.
More than 190 million doses of the flu vaccine have been distributed this season, but the number of infections is so low that it’s difficult for the CDC to make its annual calculation of the vaccine’s effectiveness, Brammer said. There just isn’t enough data, she said.
It also calls into question the planning of the flu shot for next season. Such work usually begins by checking which influenza strains are circulating in the world and predicting which of them are likely to predominate in the coming year.
“But there are not many [flu] virus to watch, ”Brammer said.
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