NEW YORK (AP) – February is usually the highlight of flu season, with doctors’ offices and hospitals crammed with suffering patients. But not this year.
Influenza has virtually disappeared from the US, with reports coming in at much lower levels than anything seen in decades.
Experts believe that measures to ward off coronavirus – mask wear, social distance and virtual training – have been a major factor in preventing a ‘twindemy’ of flu and COVID-19. A push to get more people vaccinated against the flu has probably also helped, as have fewer people traveling.
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Another possible explanation: the coronavirus caused flu and other bugs that are more common in the fall and winter. Scientists do not understand the mechanism behind it, but it will correspond to the patterns seen when certain flu strains dominate over others, said dr. Arnold Monto, a flu expert at the University of Michigan, said.
According to a surveillance system that is about 25 years old, this is the lowest flu season we have had so far, said Lynnette Brammer of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Hospitals say that the usual steady stream of flu-stricken patients has never materialized.
At the Maine Medical Center in Portland, the largest hospital in the state, “I saw zero documented flu cases this winter,” said Dr. Nate Mick, head of the emergency department, said.
Ditto in the capital of Oregon, where the outpatient respiratory clinics attached to Salem Hospital did not see any confirmed flu cases.
“It’s beautiful,” said Dr. Michelle Rasmussen of the health care system.
The numbers are staggering, as flu has long been the biggest threat to infectious diseases. In recent years, it has been blamed for 600,000 to 800,000 annual hospitalizations and 50,000 to 60,000 deaths.
Worldwide, flu activity was at very low levels in China, Europe and elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere. And that follows reports of little flu in South Africa, Australia and other countries during the winter months of May to August in the Southern Hemisphere.
The story, of course, was different with the coronavirus, which killed more than 500,000 people in the United States. COVID-19 cases and deaths reached new heights in December and January before a recent decline began.
However, flu-related hospitalizations are a small fraction of where they would stand even during a very mild season, said Brammer, who oversees the detection of the virus by CDC.
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Data on flu deaths for the entire U.S. population are difficult to compile quickly, but CDC officials keep track of the number of deaths of children. So far this season, one fatal disease has been reported in children, compared to 92 reported at the same point in last year’s flu season.
“A lot of parents will tell you that their kids were just as healthy this year as ever before because they weren’t swimming in the germ pool at school or daycare like they used to,” Mick said.
Some doctors say they have even stopped sending samples for the test because they do not think flu is present. Nevertheless, many laboratories use a ‘multiplex test’ developed by CDC to check for coronavirus and influenza samples, Brammer said.
More than 190 million flu vaccine doses have been distributed this season, but the number of infections is so low that it is difficult for CDC to do its annual calculation of how well the vaccine works, Brammer said. There is simply not enough data, she said.
It is also a challenge to plan the flu vaccine for next season. Such work usually begins with examining which flu strains are circulating around the world and predicting which of them are likely to dominate in the coming year.
“But there are not many (flu) viruses to look for,” Brammer said.