Thread by @HelenBranswell

1. Gonna sneak in a little #flu info here. New global data from @WHO covering the period to the end of Sept. shows flu activity remains very low around the world. Where flu is detected, influenza B (Victoria) viruses seem to be the dominant viruses spreading.

2. Of nearly 250,000 respiratory specimens tested for flu around the world in the 2 weeks ending Sept. 26, only 2,022 were positive. That's a 0.8% positivity rate.
#Flu will return & when it does, we could pay dearly for its hiatus. But not clear when the return will occur.

3. I'll add more to this thread after 11 a.m., when @CDC posts its weekly #flu report, FluView.
Here's a link to the @WHO flu report. who.int/teams/global-i…

4. I'm belatedly going to tweet about this week's FluView report from @CDCgov. It's for the week ending Oct. 9, which is the 1st week of the 2021-22 #flu season. (I know, weird.)
The pink line here was 2020-21, which was a non-season. The red is triangle is the start of 2021-22.

5. #Flu activity in the US is still really low. Of nearly 29,000 flu tests run in the week ending Oct. 9, only 42 were positive for flu. That's 0.14%.
FluView is here, by the way: cdc.gov/flu/weekly/ind…

6. There isn't a lot of #flu, but there isn't zero flu either. FluView reports that in the week ending Oct. 9, 276 people were hospitalized for flu in the U.S. But this graph suggests that's kind of been static since late spring.

7. Blessedly, there appears to be little #flu in long-term care facilities at present.

8. There is something (or there are some things) going around. The DC area reports high influenza-like activity, but ILI could be a range of things from flu to human coronaviruses to multiple other viruses.

9. I think the jury is still out whether #flu will make a big comeback this year. But it will make a big comeback sometime, and you don't want to catch it when it does. Flu is a miserable illness. Get a flu shot.