Flu Has Disappeared Worldwide During the COVID Pandemic (scientificamerican.com) 307
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: Since the novel coronavirus began its global spread, influenza cases reported to the World Health Organization have dropped to minuscule levels. The reason, epidemiologists think, is that the public health measures taken to keep the coronavirus from spreading also stop the flu. Influenza viruses are transmitted in much the same way as SARS-CoV-2, but they are less effective at jumping from host to host. As Scientific American reported last fall, the drop-off in flu numbers was both swift and universal. Since then, cases have stayed remarkably low. "There's just no flu circulating," says Greg Poland, who has studied the disease at the Mayo Clinic for decades. The U.S. saw about 600 deaths from influenza during the 2020-2021 flu season. In comparison, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated there were roughly 22,000 deaths in the prior season and 34,000 two seasons ago.
Because each year's flu vaccine is based on strains that have been circulating during the past year, it is unclear how next year's vaccine will fare, should the typical patterns of the disease return. [...] Public health experts are grateful for the reprieve. Some are also worried about a lost immune response, however. If influenza subsides for several years, today's toddlers could miss a chance to have an early-age response imprinted on their immune system. That could be good or bad, depending on what strains circulate during the rest of their life. For now, future flu transmission remains a roll of the dice.
Because each year's flu vaccine is based on strains that have been circulating during the past year, it is unclear how next year's vaccine will fare, should the typical patterns of the disease return. [...] Public health experts are grateful for the reprieve. Some are also worried about a lost immune response, however. If influenza subsides for several years, today's toddlers could miss a chance to have an early-age response imprinted on their immune system. That could be good or bad, depending on what strains circulate during the rest of their life. For now, future flu transmission remains a roll of the dice.
Australia (Score:2)
We simply did not have a flu season last year in Australia, unsurprisingly.
I did not bother vaccinating then, but "winter is coming", and people are a lot more relaxed about hygiene than a year ago, since we have mostly avoided the pandemic so far. (One case escaped quarantine, and the whole city went into partial lockdown for 3 days). I no longer see many people using the hand sanitiser at the supermarket.
So I recently got the flu-vax . A whole $15 at the chemist (drugstore). Even in
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My colony and I got hit hard by an out of country flu virus hard early in in the end of hot August 2019 before we could get our annual shots.
I ranked this as my #2 worst flu ever over #1 during my high school days (had bumps on my fingers, skins peeling, vomiting, diarrhea, etc.). They took about a couple weeks for me to finally get better too. I easily get sick and slow to recover too due to my weak defected body. :(
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Bow down to the overlords. ;)
Lockdowns every year (Score:3)
Of course airborne contagions would be affected as the entire world is at a mass quarantine. I would not be surprised other diseases like hepatitis or aids would be on decline as well.
The problem is our current method of fighting is not very sustainable. COVID was a real risk, flu, as bad as it is, does not warrant a year long lockdown.
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It's important to understand that flu is not airborne. Covid is passed on through the air. Flu reproduction factor is around 1.5 while covid's is over 3 .
Measures that are insufficient to bring covid under control are overkill for bringing flu under control. That means that we can feel a lot safer about this big pandemic fear of another spanish flu (Kansas flu really). We'd be able to contain it while we prepare the flu shots. As long as everything keeps working of course.
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You confuse your ability to spell 'moron' with knowing what you are talking about.
You don't use the description 'airborne' when an ill person can infect people nearby with coughing or sneezing, even if that means the virus is transmitted through the air. You use it when for a virus which can infect people further away. now this is always a matter of degrees but for flu the chances of infecting someone further away are very small.
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See here: https://www.who.int/news-room/... [who.int]
Doesn't make me happy (Score:4, Interesting)
Why doesn't this make me happy? Because I'm honestly worried that the same bleeding hearts who wouldn't let us just allow COVID to run its course will want to keep up the COVID measures to keep the flu at its current level ev en after we all have COVID vaccinations.
It's been too long since the Spanish Flu. It's been too long since Polio and Diptheria. People aren't used to infectious diseases actually being serious. Remember when it was that when one kid in a family got measles that they all were brought home to get it too? We haven't had a serious disease in almost two generations now and we've got soft. Oh my GOD, it might kill 3% of those it infects! Two generations ago, influenza itself was as fatal as COVID is today and we just got on with life. The disease burden of COVID being left to run its course is less than the economic burden of trying to mitigate it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm strongly pro vax. We should have isolated the elderly and let it run its course in the young. Instead the media flouts tales of a 13 year old dying of COVID, a one in a million outcome and forgets that flu used to do that to the occasional kid too, but nobody reported it. It was just normal.
Re:Doesn't make me happy (Score:4, Insightful)
The disease burden of COVID being left to run its course is less than the economic burden of trying to mitigate it.
The economy waxes and wanes on its own even without a pandemic. Letting people die as figurative sacrifices on the altar of capitalism is barbaric, and it might not have even resulted in any economic improvement. You're also making the assumption that no one close to you, or who was important to someone you care about, would've died. It's all well and good to look at 3% as a just a cold hard statistic, and not imagine that it might've been a family member or good friend that became part of that statistic.
Economies can rebound. You can't bring the dead back to life.
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Re:Doesn't make me happy (Score:5, Insightful)
Thankfully we have enough food to feed everyone so nobody starved to death. Lockdowns are obviously temporary measures to halt exponential growth, nobody likes them or would like to keep them forever just for shits and giggles.
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Economies can rebound. You can't bring the dead back to life.
This is fallacy of false choice. You presenting it as "we do everything we can to minimize deaths" vs. "do nothing", when in reality both choices have deaths associated with it. This is because lockdowns also kill people - deaths of despair, postponed pregnancies, overdoses and poverty-inflicting job losses cannot be excluded form consideration.
Read this study: Covid Lockdown Cost/Benefits: A Critical Assessment of the Literature [PDF] [www.sfu.ca]
An examination of over 80 Covid-19 studies reveals that many relied on assumptions that were false, and which tended to over-estimate the benefits and under-estimate the costs of lockdown. As a result, most of the early cost/benefit studies arrived at conclusions that were refuted later by data, and which rendered their cost/benefit findings incorrect. Research done over the past six months has shown that lockdowns have had, at best, a marginal effect on the number of Covid-19 deaths. Generally speaking, the ineffectiveness of lockdown stems from voluntary changes in behavior. Lockdown jurisdictions were not able to prevent non- compliance, and non-lockdown jurisdictions benefited from voluntary changes in behavior that mimicked lockdowns. The limited effectiveness of lockdowns ex-plains why, after one year, the unconditional cumulative deaths per million, and the pattern of daily deaths per million, is not negatively correlated with the stringency of lockdown across countries.
Re:Doesn't make me happy (Score:5, Informative)
Thank you. I did read it. I have the following issues:
I'm sure that an economic case could be made for a cost/benefit analysis of lockdowns vs premature death, but this paper sure ain't it. A real paper discussing the tradeoffs would have to try to figure out all the costs/benefits of lockdowns (lack of flu being one), differences in work habits (working from home considered a benefit for many - see google), and tease out the differences between "depression caused by lockdown" vs "depression caused by grandma dying of COVID". I'm sure that plenty such papers will be written some time in the future. But anyone who relies on this one is as much a crank as the author of this childish pseudo-science.
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The issue is that there is not just one kind of "lockdown", and worse, what is written on the books is not necessarily what is being adhered to in society. Most of the stores are open in my state and we have one of the lowest infection rates, but only because we have an extremely high mask-use and social distancing rate. In states with large numbers of lawbreakers, lawmakers who refuse to adhere to science, or both, any half-assed "lockdown" on the books does very little.
In short, we could have seriously mi
Re:Doesn't make me happy (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, that was a dumb idea. It fails under its own criteria for success because natural immunity doesn't last long enough. It also fails because a lot of people aren't willing to go out in a pandemic. Controlling the pandemic is the only way to save the economy. Plus, that leads to more (localized) variants, dragging out the pandemic and causing more travel restrictions. Literally there's no good that comes from "letting it run its course"
I mean, I get that the latest Spanish flu epidemic was all of like 12 years ago under Obama, but what's your point?
It wasn't. But if you mean during the first round of Spanish flu, people masked up then too.
Does this argument ever work for you? Don't most people over the age of eleven go "I'm not going to do something stupid just because you call me names". The fact is, I don't want to get sick and I don't want to get other people sick. So I won't go out while a pandemic is going on that I don't have a vaccine for.
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It wasn't.
Two generations ago, my grandfather fought in WW2. The 1940s - 1960s saw some rather horrific years dealing with influenza as we fought to vaccinate against the variants. Quite honestly, we have no damn idea just how deadly COVID-19 is. More on that later.
But if you mean during the first round of Spanish flu, people masked up then too.
Yeah, and with about as much efficacy. Much like India is dealing with right now, the second wave of the Spanish Flu, was far more deadly. New York City, suffered through a fourth wave towards the end in 1920. Sure as hell hope they're not facing tha
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And that is a fine choice to make, but pray tell, why are those who place higher value on living their life differently despite the risk looked at with such disdain?
I mean if I walked up and took a shit on your driveway would you look on me with disdain? I mean it's unhygienic, and in has a negative impact on you but I just value my freedom to shit on your driveway over other social norms. You're saying that people should be free to do anything even if it affects you directly such as by passing on illnesses to you, but somehow you're okay with this?
Re:Doesn't make me happy (Score:5, Insightful)
And that is a fine choice to make, but pray tell, why are those who place higher value on living their life differently despite the risk looked at with such disdain?.
Because your choice effects everyone around you, you dumb fuck.
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Flu Surveilance and Flu testing are easy (Score:5, Informative)
Since when are fringe theories being presented as fact a the top of the feed? Gee whiz, folks. For all the uninitiated out there: FLU TESTS ARE EASY.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/sympto... [cdc.gov]
And the US does flu surveillance:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly... [cdc.gov]
And don't forget the folks who last year were looking for flu but found COVID-19 in the wild:
https://seattleflu.org/ [seattleflu.org]
The network still looks for and tests for influenza. So don't go around giving no-citation BS answers conflating COVID-19 and influenza that came from your gut feelings about things. OK? Flu had a terrible year last year: outperformed by SARS-Cov-2 and outfoxed by masking, distancing, and quarantining.
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Or it just shows how well those measures worked. Flu tests are common, but only if a person gets tested - often people would just bear it out and be sick a few days.
So even if only 1 in 10 cases of the flu gets to a doctor and recorded, it really means there was barely a flu season.
In Canada, there was something like 40 reported cases in total, not even enough to declare start of flu season.
And with people working from home, social distancing, not going out when sick, no big surprise that the flu didn't sta
Isn't this a case AGAINST flu vaccination then? (Score:3, Insightful)
"If influenza subsides for several years, today's toddlers could miss a chance to have an early-age response imprinted on their immune system."
So if everyone were to get a flu shot, why isn't it this wouldn't have the same effect?
Honestly I've been quite happy not to get sick in the last year. On the bright side maybe a bunch of these flu strains will go extinct if we keep this up.
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Honestly I've been quite happy not to get sick in the last year. On the bright side maybe a bunch of these flu strains will go extinct if we keep this up.
Yeah, but some of our alcohol consumption has quadrupled so we spend more time hungover. I love it when I call some company that has changed to "work from home" and the bastard is toasted. At least they aren't driving. And they created a boom in the economy involving alcohol delivery services which have popped up all over the place in the last year.
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The flu shot only protects against the worst variants in any given year. There will be enough exposure with the shots. The annual shots are for the different variants, not because your body forgets.
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I'm not sure about the rest of the world, but AFAIK, for at least the past few years, the US formulation has inevitably repeated 2 or 3 of the same strains year after year, and hit "peak uselessness" (to people with normal functioning immune systems who were vaccinated annually) about 5 years ago(*). Now that influenza vaccine includes 4 strains, it's a tiny bit less useless to normal people, because in theory, one of the 4 strains is now officially supposed to be for a strain that's likely to be the most w
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On the bright side maybe a bunch of these flu strains will go extinct if we keep this up.
I wouldn't exactly label replacing them, with COVID variants, a "bright side".
Is it then wise to continue influenza vaccinations (Score:2, Flamebait)
If COVID precautions have basically driven flu infections down to zero, is it wise to continue with influenza vaccinations -- especially of the elderly?
There is a correlation between flu vaccination and Covid lethality - see link [sourceforge.net].
Dataset here [sourceforge.net] (in 'data.xlsx')
An complication is co-infection with both the flu and COVID seems to worsen the risk of death -- so the rate of co-infection matters. A British study [bmj.com] had 0.25% of COVID patients infected by the flu, while this Indian study had 8% with a much smaller sam [theunion.org]
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If COVID precautions have basically driven flu infections down to zero, is it wise to continue with influenza vaccinations -- especially of the elderly?
There is a correlation between flu vaccination and Covid lethality - see link [sourceforge.net].
Who here immediately sees the reason for that spurious correlation? No? Hint: More developed countries with higher rates of vaccination also tend to have higher population density and thus higher lethality.
The flu (Score:2)
The flu is nowhere near as contagious as the covid coronavirus .. therefore even simple measures were likely enough to eliminate it. No need to get too depressed though, Iâ(TM)m sure it will be back.
I can't wait until things go back to normal (Score:2)
where people don't wash their hands or cover their mouth when they cough.
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I'm not going back to normal. Going to keep wearing a mask even after I've been vaccinated and infection rates have died down.
Suggestion: Yearly global 14-day lockdown. (Score:4, Interesting)
And I mean a *complete* lockdown. No leaving the house. Food delivered by a special team that goes into a separate lockdown after the 14 days. Any emergency services or people forced to break the lockdown go into that second quarantine too. Borders stay closed to any country that fails to implement it flawlessly too. (Otherwise it would all be pointless.)
People could still work from home during that time, where possible.
It would completely kill off most infectious diseases, an save us trillions in healthcare spendings.
(It is implied that the lockdown food delivery will be at a price equal to or lower than home cooking with equal or better quality, so you can afford it when poor. This should be doable since it's always cheaper to cook for many people than to cook for just a few. E.g. a pot of ragout for 100 people still just takes one person to stir.)
I want to see that studied, to see if it would be worth it.
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Not quite that simple, I’m afraid.
People live together. So even after the 2 week lockdown, some family members will have just caught the disease. Those people will then go out and spread it.
And of course, there are those who stay ill longer than others (e.g. pregnant women, who’s immune systems are weaker). Same net effect.
I’m sure a 14 day annual lockdown would have an impact, but it’d be a far cry from killing off most infectious diseases.
Re: Suggestion: Yearly global 14-day lockdown. (Score:3)
Yes, I agree. ....well, I don't wanna be rude but I do not k ow a more fitting word ... lazier.)
That is why I said we should studiy it.
To see if we can buff out those complications or if they are simply too much. (I'm the can-do type who sees it as a challenge and doesn't easily give up. I know other people are generally much
So your input would be exactly the sort of thing that's useful here.
And I also think it would be quite hard to get right.
I think I could do it... Because basically my entire life was tr
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And I mean a *complete* lockdown. No leaving the house.
Well you're dreaming because people in the US wont even wear a dinky mask to help people not die from Covid-19. The refrain they use is "it's just the flu!". You need to understand that there is a significant contingent of human population that is composed of selfish children in adult form.
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Re:Influenza has disappeared (Score:5, Informative)
>compensation to medical facilities
Citation needed.
Australia actually increased their testing for flu and still saw the rate plummet: https://www.newscientist.com/a... [newscientist.com]
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" There was no such effort in the US"
There was and still is. I have seen a TV ad for - 'We don't have time for the flu' and featuring people of different occupations, including 1st responders, with sleeves rolled up and a bandaid. They all have masks on. I first saw it before the vaccine for Covid was available, but I still see it in the last few days.
Of course they may not show it on Fox News.
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Austria had exactly 2 documented cases of Flu hitting the hospitals, and yes they screen everyone here coming in with flu like symptoms also for flu.It really was mostly gone simply by all the measures we have applied to stop covid. Another indication that covid is not just like the flu which becomes wronger every day (just check India atm)
Re:Influenza has disappeared (Score:4, Informative)
>compensation to medical facilities
Citation needed.
Australia actually increased their testing for flu and still saw the rate plummet: https://www.newscientist.com/a... [newscientist.com]
One thing to remember about Australia is that aside from Victoria the overwhelming majority of the country did not actually lock down during the influenza season (which for obvious reasons is out of phase with the Northern hemisphere). For much of the flu season the majority of Australia had no restrictions, shops and bars were open, people were going about their lives.
Yet the number still plummeted due to practice of basic hygiene and limiting travel.
In countries with actual lockdowns during the flu season there were almost no reported cases.
Re:Influenza has disappeared (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, a lot of people underestimate how much the decreased travel reduces the spread of influenza. Flu doesn't quite disappear over the summer, but it gets pretty close, and as a result, if you don't get seeding from areas with high incidence, you're going to have *way* less flu, not only because the exponential growth starts from fewer initial cases, but also because the dominant strains from the previous season won't have mutated nearly as much in-country thanks to the lower rate of spread during the summer, so a larger percentage of people will be immune to the variants of the virus that started exponentially growing from that small number of initial cases.
Also, a lot of folks underestimate how much increased vaccination has contributed to reducing the case rate, particularly in years when it isn't being seeded much from other parts of the world, and when a high rate of social distancing has kept the rate of mutation down.
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The requirement for positive test doesn't exist for influenza either, and wasn't required on any of the data for past years. How can you be sure it was influenza and not side effects from second hand cigarette smoke?
Re:Influenza has disappeared (Score:4, Informative)
At least in Austria, where I live, if a physician diagnoses the Flu or Covid-19, he has to administer at least on test to corroborate the diagnosis. Otherwise the diagnosis is ICD10 J06.9 "Acute upper respiratory infection, unspecified". And we also saw the Flu cases drop down to seven acute Flu cases.
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Your argument is: Because you can cheat, everyone is cheating.
At least in Austria, where I live, if a physician diagnoses the Flu or Covid-19, he has to administer at least on test to corroborate the diagnosis. Otherwise the diagnosis is ICD10 J06.9 "Acute upper respiratory infection, unspecified". And we also saw the Flu cases drop down to seven acute Flu cases.
Yes, so which is harder to believe, seven flu cases, or that Greed exists in the medical system?
You act as if Chaos and Clusterfuck running an ER during a global pandemic, along with a blank check being handed to many for "COVID relief", results in recordkeeping that is accurate or honest.
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It's so much a thing that any fire of business premises is investigated as potential arson.
Re: Influenza has disappeared (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Influenza has disappeared (Score:5, Informative)
Just about every Covid case in Australia is tested for genetic variant, and surprise, it’s never the flu. You’re desperately clutching at straws to support your bullshit narrative. The facts are clear, except to the deliberately blind like you.
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No thanks.
Re: Influenza has disappeared (Score:2)
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Oh wow. A bunch of statements and responses with no evidence. Thanks.
Flu incidence is really minuscule even with increased testing this season according to data https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/#ClinicalLaboratories
Please, bring on something to support your position other than you saying it is so.
Re:Influenza has disappeared (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's say you're right.
Following annual trends, flu deaths would have contributed in the tens of thousands. COVID has resulted in hundred of thousands.
Let's go one farther - I frequently hear the argument that COVID deaths are overreported on death certificates, for instance. However, the total count of *all* deaths, ignoring the reported causes, show a clear large increase over the past year, even before the lockdowns. The total is roughly 500,000 above what has been a fairly stable baseline.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/... [cdc.gov]
This was debatable (in good faith) a year ago when we had much less data. It's not really debatable now.
I don't think you're correct, regardless. Flu transmits via similar vectors as COVID, so assuming that flu numbers would maintain when the vector for transmitting it is attenuated doesn't seem like a particularly rational hypothesis.
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In any event, you are citing excess mortalities overall, which I agree will be higher, but that can be attributed to a number of factors (such as the destru
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Re: Influenza has disappeared (Score:2)
Re:Influenza has disappeared (Score:5, Interesting)
Other countries didnt shut down quite like we did, didnt take it as seriously as we did, and didnt prepare like we did.
Are you talking about Sweden? Sweden's single payer health system met and decided to double their ICU capacity before they even got their first case, at an extreme expense that will take decades to pay back. I'm not talking about a parking garage with some hospital beds here. I'm talking about actual ICU capacity, with additional staff trained to do the work. Sweden prepared more than the US did, significantly more.
Think about this: excessive deaths due to strain on the health care system is what experts warned would happen if we didn't "flatten the curve". We didn't flatten it enough. This led to hospital resources being spent on covid patients (both on care and on transportation) that would have normally been available for other emergencies. This, as predicted, led to excess non-covid deaths.
Keeping ICU utilization below the maximum has always been the goal for every healthcare system in the world. Not the covid death rate. Not the covid reporting numbers. ICU utilization is it. Some countries increased capacity, hoping it would be enough. Others did lockdowns. I'm sure some did both.
We basically took away their bread and butter business of elective surgeries,
Sounds like they made a business mistake to me. They should have seen the writing on the wall in Jan/Feb 2020, converted space into ICU space instead of doing the bare minimum FEMA tents, and paid to train their specialists on ICU protocols. Maybe we wouldn't have even needed lockdowns, then.
and then incentivized them with money to report COVID cases
What's your opinion of this alternate conspiracy theory: they didn't fudge the numbers. If that were the case, the most profitable thing to do would be to lobby the government to do lockdowns, and not do anything to increase capacity, ensuring everyone gets to have a turn on the equipment you already have. That fits exactly what happened, and we don't need to rely on people with literally no skin in the game filling out fraudulent paperwork.
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It's not just ICU space, either. There has been a severe shortage of nursing care as well. Consider that many nurses are young and female, and have a family. My fiancee is a nurse, and she said people were quitting in droves to keep their families safe.
She worked a covid unit for a while that had only 2 nurses and 3 assistants for something like 130 patients. Even at $150k/yr, no one wanted to do it.
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a well nourished population
Obese isn't the same as well nourished.
Access denied (Score:2)
Because you're an ignorant fuck and know you're wrong. The link works fine. In fact here is a mirror https://archive.is/vEShE [archive.is]
Re:Influenza has disappeared (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it is politically expedient (and profitable in the US, because of compensation to medical facilities for reported (but unverified by tests cases)) to report the cases as COVID.
I know, those damn US politics affecting the numbers in every other country in the world. /sarcasm.
You're an idiot (not sarcasm).
Re:Influenza has disappeared (Score:5, Informative)
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Indeed. Influenza is not eradicated. TFS says there were 600 cases just in the US. Thousands more worldwide.
Also, the flu has animal reservoirs. So even if it is 100% eradicated from humans, it will still come back. Most new strains of flu originate in animals rather than from mutations in humans.
Re: Influenza has disappeared (Score:2, Informative)
600 **deaths** (Score:4, Informative)
Not cases.
Re:Influenza has disappeared (Score:4, Insightful)
TFS says there were 600 cases just in the US
600 deaths. That means there were probably a couple hundred thousand cases. Just not tens of millions like most years.
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No matter what the USA did do you think it would have prevented the India crisis? Canada crisis? Stop living in the USA bubble. We are part of a larger world.
Not sure what you think this has to do with the discussion about flu cases in the USA.
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Pretty much all experts in the field have been saying that COVID-19 will always be with us. You seem ignorant, stupid or all 3.
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It can jump from birds to people so of course it will come back.
Re:Influenza has disappeared (Score:5, Informative)
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People will think I am wrong, but since I am not, Influenza numbers will return. We did not eradicate it.
Nice straw man you got there - it'd be too bad if something happened to it...
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Re:Influenza has disappeared (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't worry, we don't think you are wrong. We just think you are an idiot. You are right, we did not eradicate it (and nobody is claiming that we did, except in your mind apparently). But you are an idiot for buying into the "flu reported as COVID" bullshit. Did you ever stop to think that the dropping flu numbers this year were because when covid hit we weren't quite sure what to do, so we started out by assuming it spread like the flu and then...wait for it...implemented protocols that we determined through decades of experience were highly effective at stopping the spread of flu? Wow, who would've guessed protocols that are effective at stopping the spread of flu would stop the spread of flu? Mind blown!!!!
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Oh, so a few brain cells started firing, and you quickly decided "we'll put an end to that, mister". Outdoor activities are a much less significant contributor to transmission than are indoor. That's true for both flu and covid. It's safer but not totally safe. And especially last summer we really had no idea yet how much, so we were trying to play it extra safe. You might notice that a year later, as we heading towards our 2nd summer and there has been a lot more research on the topic, most of the experts
Re:Influenza has disappeared (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope. Influenza's R0 averages just 1.4 to 1.6. COVID-19's R0 is estimated at 2.8 — MUCH higher. You're confusing the basic reproduction number (R0) with the growth rate over time. The two are related, but are not interchangeable.
The basic reproduction number (R0) is the average number of people who catch the virus from a single case. The rate of growth depends on this. But it also depends on the incubation period. Why? Because most of the people who spread a disease do so in the first day after symptoms emerge (or, for coronavirus, in the day before symptoms emerge). After that, they're sick enough to not spread it around much.
What this means is that because flu's incubation period is two or three days, one case turns into 1.4 cases every two or three days. Similarly, because coronavirus's incubation period has a median of 6 days with a long tail of up to a couple of weeks, it turns into 2.8 cases once a week or so.
As a result, the weekly case count increase for flu is similar to (or maybe even slightly higher than) coronavirus, absent any mitigation, even though the per-person rate of increase (R0) is much lower, because the flu virus experienced two or three generations of reproduction in the same time as it took for the coronavirus to experience a single generation.
But when you cut the R0 in half through mitigation, flu starts rapidly declining (because half of even 1.6 is less than 1), with fewer new cases emerging every three days or so, whereas coronavirus still grows slightly every week or so.
Re: Influenza has disappeared (Score:2)
Re:Influenza has disappeared (Score:5, Informative)
COVID-19's R0 is estimated at 2.8 — MUCH higher. (...) The basic reproduction number (R0) is the average number of people who catch the virus from a single case.
R0 is the average number of people infected from a single case assuming that there is no immunity and given environmental conditions and behavior. For Covid-19, R0 was estimated 2.8-ish for "behavior January 2020", based on the exponential growth around that time. Since then, the original virus got outcompeted by the more infectious D614G "EU" variant (+25%) and then D614G got outcompeted by the B.1.1.7 "UK" variant (+40%). Possibly, the P.1 "Brazilian" variant is even more infectious since it seems to outcompete B.1.1.7. (It's not certain whether this is due to it bypassing immunity against B.1.1.7/D614G or due to a higher transmissibility.)
If we return to pre-pandemic behavior (mass gatherings, no face masks, no distancing, going to work with the sniffles), we're looking at R0=5 for B.1.1.7 and R=3.5 (without the zero) if 30% of the population is immune. Countries that are struggling at the moment with R=1 for Covid-19 apparently have managed to suppress R by a factor 3.5 using nonpharmaceutical interventions. If the same factor applies to influenza, the effect is even larger the factor 2 that you assume.
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R0 is the average number of people infected from a single case assuming that there is no immunity and given environmental conditions and behavior.
Yup. I left out a lot in that explanation, like how denser areas show a higher R0 behavior followed by a faster falloff because of more frequent contact between people, etc.
Possibly, the P.1 "Brazilian" variant is even more infectious since it seems to outcompete B.1.1.7. (It's not certain whether this is due to it bypassing immunity against B.1.1.7/D614G or due to a higher transmissibility.)
Or higher susceptibility among younger, unvaccinated people. Or the estimates for the R0 were too low in general before, and the strain became the dominant strain by random chance in some places because the people who had it just happened to be the ones not being careful and/or just happened to infect someone who was a natural superspr
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You might want to take your own advice about reading up on things for talking about R numbers.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronaviru... [cdc.gov]
covid current best estimate is 2.5 (with a range of 2-4 given).
https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe... [fivethirtyeight.com]
R naught is usually around 1 or 1.5 for flu. And for SARS-CoV-2 it’s between 2 and 4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
covid: 2.9 (2.4–3.4) flu list 3 different figures from different source: "0.9–2.1", "1.6 (1.3–2.0)", and "1.3 (1.2–1.4)"
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We would need to eradicate it from animal reservoirs to eliminate it, meaning we would have to give up both bacon and chicken nuggets to do it, so its never gonna happen.
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We would need to eradicate it from animal reservoirs to eliminate it, meaning we would have to give up both bacon and chicken nuggets to do it, so its never gonna happen.
We can still keep coffee though, right?
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People will think I am ignorant, since they don't familiarize themselves with the medical information behind my statements. That doesn't mean I am, Iggymanz.
Re:Influenza has disappeared (Score:5, Informative)
75 percent of influenza in humans is A type. It will come back because animals are reservoirs of influenza.
As aside, seals can carry influenza B.
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Oooh, yeah. It's a conspiracy bro! You caught them, you should go post your theory on Facebook!
What idiot didn't think we would have lower flu numbers? Any moron could have told you that we would, it's something a child could figure out. The same mitigation factors that work on Coronavirus work on the flu viruses.
Re:More likely... (Score:5, Insightful)
Which begs us to ask the question:
If the masking and isolation took two orders of magnitude off the flu numbers in more than one place, how much did they spare us of COVID? Flipping the question, how bad would COVID have been without the protective measures that made flu a non-issue?
People who know what they're talking about do worry about a rebound effect. On the other hand the next time flu tries to ravage us, it may be facing mRNA vaccines.
Re: More likely... (Score:4, Insightful)
Weâ(TM)re currently observing how bad COVID gets if you let it get out of control. India is demonstrating it, and Iâ(TM)m sure weâ(TM)ll discover itâ(TM)s much worse than it currently appears when the chaos ends.
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Maybe they didn't feel constrained by the previous administration any more, and felt they could be more honest.
Re:Seriously believe this? (Score:5, Informative)
Does anyone seriously believe this?
We magically made the flu, which is a highly infectious disease that kills a bunch of people every year, go away by installing stupid plexiglass barriers everywhere and wearing 2 pointless face masks. However covid is running rampant and is in danger of killing people multiple times.
Yes, I believe it. And it is easily explained using high-school-level math. The reason you don't believe it is because you incorrectly believe that influenza is "a highly infectious disease". It isn't. In fact, it just *barely* stays around.
Under winter weather conditions, each person who gets flu spreads it to only about 1.4 to 1.6 people. This number is called the "basic reproduction rate", or "R0", pronounced r-naught.
So every three days or so, the number of people with flu increases by 1.4x to 1.6x. That sounds like a lot, until you consider that each person with COVID-19 spreads it to, on average, 2.8 people (with some estimates as high as 5 or 6). Thus coronavirus is a much more contagious virus (though not as contagious as, for example, chickenpox, at 10 to 12 people).
During the summer months, each person spreads flu to fewer than one person, on average, because people (particularly kids) are outside more, and thus around each other indoors for less time, plus there's less heating to dry out people's sinuses, higher vitamin D intake, and probably dozens of other factors that all conspire to make airborne viruses less contagious in summer. So during the summer, flu infections quickly drop to minimal levels. However, when it is summer in one hemisphere, it's winter in the other hemisphere, and thanks to huge amounts of world travel, flu comes back just in time to start the next flu season. (Plus, there are animal reservoirs, not-quite-complete eradication, etc.) This also happens with coronavirus, but the reduction in spread is not necessarily enough to cause a decline in cases, depending on other factors.
However, that's not quite the end of the story. Flu and coronavirus *appear* to spread at similar rates, thanks to the coronavirus's longer incubation period. Each person doesn't start spreading a virus until the end of the incubation period, so each generation of flu basically takes three or four days, whereas each generation of coronavirus takes a week or more. And that rate of spread generally determines how well a virus remains active in the population. Too slow a spread, and it dies out. Too fast a spread, and everyone becomes immune before it can mutate enough to reinfect people. There's a sweet spot, and flu and coronavirus seem to be in that sweet spot.
Now here's the important part. As soon as you introduce a mitigation strategy that cuts the spread, whether that's distancing, masks, lockdowns, or some combination of the above, because each person who is sick with influenza spreads that virus to fewer people than each sick person with COVID-19, the impact of that mitigation on the two viruses is radically different.
Suppose you come up with a mitigation strategy that cuts the basic reproduction rate in half, i.e. each person spreads it to half as many people as they otherwise would have without the masks or whatever. That means influenza's reproduction rate goes from 1.4x to 0.7x, so every three days, there are fewer influenza cases than three days earlier. But coronavirus's reproduction rate goes from 2.8 to 1.4, so every week there are more cases than the week before, just not as many more as there would have been without the masks or whatever.
And that's why masks and distancing absolutely collapsed the influenza numbers, while only slowing down the coronavirus numbers somewhat. Flu was barely contagious enough to stick around, but coronavirus was much more contagious, and thus more resistant to the mitigation strategies.
Re:Seriously believe this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Most people don't realize it, but cities that have a lot of visitors from the opposite hemisphere (like Miami) usually have TWO annual flu seasons... the official winter one (along with the rest of the country), and a really nasty SUMMER one (which happens to be the middle of winter, and the peak of flu season, in the other hemisphere). ESPECIALLY if you work for a company with offices in the southern hemisphere, and people making constant business trips north and south all year.
Summer flu often ends up being worse because nobody EXPECTS to catch a flu in mid-July, so even people who'd grab Tamiflu at the first sign of a runny nose in December fail to recognize it as influenza, and end up waiting too long for Tamiflu to do much good.
The main problem with influenza vaccine (if you aren't frail and in poor health) is the fact that the strains included within it are chosen primarily based upon how dangerous they are to vulnerable populations, and NOT how likely they are to infect YOU with a "nuisance" strain. From what I recall, the specific 3 strains chosen sometime around 2014 were particularly notorious. That year, the CDC had to choose between two strains for the third one... one was a strain they knew was unlikely to spread widely, but was likely to be particularly deadly for vulnerable populations. The other was a strain that was mostly a nuisance... but they knew (based upon how it spread in South America a few months earlier) that it was likely to spread like wildfire. They went with the rare-but-deadly strain, and that year almost everyone who was vaccinated ended up catching the flu anyway. Due to that year's spectacular failure, a decision was made to increase the number of strains to 4 going forward, so they could start including at least ONE pervasive nuisance strain in future vaccines and make the vaccine seem less useless to people with more normal immune systems.
I believe they're now studying the merits of increasing the number of strains to 6, 7, or 9. From what I read, the main problem with 9-valent formulations is that they give almost EVERYONE flu-like symptoms for several days after each vaccination. If you're in generally good health, and your primary motive for getting vaccinated is to avoid the misery of catching influenza, that's obviously a problem. Remember... most of what makes you miserable from a flu isn't the virus itself, it's your body's immune reaction to the virus. Triggering that immune reaction with vaccine produces more or less the same short-term misery as an actual infection would. It's self-limiting, but that's little consolation if you're in bed for 2 days feeling like total shit from a vaccine that's supposed to SPARE you from that kind of misery in the first place.
Apparently, they're still doing studies to find the sweet spot where the increased number of strains is likely to protect you from catching influenza at all, without making you feel almost as bad for a few days after getting vaccinated as you would have felt from catching influenza itself.
Re: Seriously believe this? (Score:2)
flu = pow(0.7, time / 3 days) covid = pow(1.4, time / 6 days)
One goes down and one goes up. Ask a grown up for help if you need any.
Re: Seriously believe this? (Score:2)
Read it carefully until you understand.
Warning: requires understanding of exponential growth and decay, rather than just the "plussing", "timesing" and "how manys" that your classroom is currently studying.
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It's an exponential function. Small changes make big differences over time. And because influenza's reproduction period is so short, it makes big differences really, really quickly.
Suppose you start with a million active flu cases worldwide at
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