Hospitals saw only a few silver streaks in the COVID-19 pandemic – a dramatic decrease in flu and other respiratory illnesses. But a year without flu can be a problem for vaccine developers and disease predictors, as well as for people who have gone a whole year without boosting their immune system against respiratory diseases. The atlantic ocean reports.
After 2020 and the pandemic began to overlap with the onset of a typical flu season, the Mayo Clinic was among hospitals that began testing patients with respiratory symptoms for COVID-19 and flu. But among the 20,000 flu tests it did between December 1 and February 1, zero came back positive. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported just as much of a 0.2 percent flu rate among 800,000 laboratory samples reported nationwide.
Although flu shots were good news for overwhelming hospitals, they were not helpful to scientists monitoring the constant mutations of the flu. Virologists and vaccinators usually go through mountain samples from around the world to predict what next year’s dominant strain will look like and make vaccines to counteract it, says Stacey Schultz-Cherry, a virologist and immunologist at St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. The atlantic ocean. A year without exposure to the virus can also be difficult for the human immune system, and especially for children who have been exposed to few, if any, types of flu.
Scientists may not have the best view of what is currently going on with the flu. But Florian Krammer, a virologist and flu expert at the Icahn School of Medicine on Mount Sinai, suggested two possibilities. Hopefully, a lack of flu circulation can “hinder the circulating tribes – possibly even take one out of commission,” The atlantic ocean write. But it is also possible that the pedigree of the flu could split in two, which could create the scientists that scientists do not even know before it goes viral. Read more at The atlantic ocean.
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