Thread by @kerpen

We have the first CDC Flu view report of the 2021-22 respiratory season.

Let's do a complete Friday ILI-Day thread for MMWR week 40.

cdc.gov/flu/weekly/ind…

Flu testing. Traditionally the clinical lab figures are the surveillance numbers, but a lot of testing has shifted to public health labs.

Comps are this year's week 40 to previous year's week 40 week-of reports, not final, to account for lag.

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

Here's CDC's ILI chart for this week. 2020-21 is now complete, and the baseline was never reached.

CDC reports a total of 276 present flu hospitalizations nationally.

For nearly a year from March 2020 to January 2021, COV2 was the only enveloped respiratory virus in circulation. Unenveloped -- rhino, entero, and adeno -- held their own. That changed right at Jan COV2 peak, when HCoVs, PIV, and RSV came back in successive waves.

Biofire:

Source link for last: syndromictrends.com

The story of the summer was that big RSV wave that filled children's hospitals, which is at a potential national peak in Biofire. Here's how it looks by region.

https://twitter.com/kerpen/status/1448315795222695937

Florida, with low-stringency interventions, flu crashed in 2020 and never came back. True in all regions, not just masky big cities. Big RSV wave rose and fell. Rhino is now rampaging and hMPV is #2.

floridahealth.gov/diseases-and-c…

Sweden week 40. No masks, no lockdowns, no school closures under age 16 -- and well into a second year with no Flu A or Flu B.

RSV now in a large out-of-season epidemic after a skipped winter.

karolinska.se/globalassets/g…

Germany. Almost all RSV, Rhino, and PIV.
influenza.rki.de/Wochenberichte…

Brazil. Very lax control measures, and a president who urges people to disregard them. Two completely skipped flu seasons.
app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjo…

The latest look at total global flu levels from WHO.

It wasn't masks, which were never used in many countries where flu disappeared and have also been shown to be ineffective for stopping influenza in many, many studies.

apps.who.int/iris/bitstream…

Japan masks every year, and pushed masks hard in 2019 with no apparent effect. But in 2020 flu disappeared with low stringency COVID interventions and has not returned. But they did have the world's largest out-of-season RSV wave, with universal masking.

niid.go.jp/niid/en/10/209…

The idea mitigations worked but unmitigated SARS-CoV2 just has a higher R (popular now among the same crowd making "twindemic!" doom predictions AGAIN and Anthony "mask seasonally" Fauci) is way too facile.

Outside of testing ramp up, I don't think we've seen R > 2, even in places without NPIs.

Rhinoviruses bounced right back despite lower R and RSV was gone until summer with comparable R to SARS-CoV2.

HCoVs were gone until SARS-CoV2 declined, then returned even with lockdown.

Plus, as Biden adviser Dr. Michael Osterholm admitted, mitigation just hasn't been very effective.

Maybe in places like Australia and New Zealand where mitigations stopped SARS-CoV2 they also stopped other viruses.

But in countries where SARS-CoV2 went wild? No.