Thread by @fascinatorfun

The Pandemic Broke the Flu
One lab
In 2 months thousands of tests have turned up +ve for covid - But the tally for the flu has held constant. The lab has run 20,000 flu tests—10 times as many as it processed the season before—zero have come back positive theatlantic.com/science/archiv…

The same baffling trend is repeating itself nationwide, and around the globe. While the coronavirus has surged, the flu and other respiratory viruses have flickered out.

It’s been the same in England.

Since early fall, about 800k lab samples have been tested in the US for the flu & reported to the CDC, and only 1,500 or so have come up positive—a mere 0.2 percent. This time last year, close to 100 times as many flu cases had been identified from nearly the same number of tests

By the middle of the 2019–20 flu season, positivity rates were cresting at about 25 -30%, mottling federal flu-activity maps in shades of red and orange, which denote the virus’s rampant spread. Now those maps remain almost entirely green, indicating low or minimal flu activity.

“We have so much COVID circulating here in Arizona,” says Erin Graf, the director of clinical microbiology at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona. “I would have thought that if people can get COVID, people can get [the] flu.”

But just 1 of 7k clue tests have come back positive.

So all the NPIs people are taking for Covid are DEFINITELY working for flu. But Covid still breaks through.

Why?

Especially as rhinoviruses (colds) seem to have continued to make their presence felt.

What’s going on?

And what will happen to flu’ when Covid no longer has the upper hand?

What will a year without exposure to flu do to immune systems given it is a shape shifting virus?

How do immunologists prepare for next year?