NEW YORK (AP) – February is usually the height of the flu season, with doctors’ offices and hospitals full of suffering patients. But not this year.
Flu has all but disappeared from the US, with reports coming in at much lower levels than ever before.
Experts say measures taken to ward off the coronavirus – wearing masks, social distancing and virtual education – were a big factor in preventing a ‘twindemic’ of flu and COVID-19. An attempt to get more people vaccinated against the flu also likely helped, as did fewer people traveling, they say.
Another possible explanation: The coronavirus flu and other bugs that are more common in the fall and winter are essentially muscular. Scientists don’t fully understand the mechanism behind it, but it would be consistent with patterns seen when certain strains of flu prevail over others, said Dr. Arnold Monto, a flu expert at the University of Michigan.
Nationally, “this is the lowest flu season we’ve ever had,” according to a surveillance system that’s about 25 years old, said Lynnette Brammer of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Hospitals say the usual steady stream of flu-stricken patients never materialized.
At the Maine Medical Center in Portland, the state’s largest hospital, “I saw zero documented cases of flu this winter,” said Dr. Nate Mick, the head of the emergency department.
Ditto in the Oregon capital, where Salem Hospital’s ventilation outpatient clinics have seen no confirmed flu cases.
“It’s wonderful,” said Dr. Michelle Rasmussen of the Health System.
The numbers are astonishing, given that influenza has long been the country’s biggest infectious disease threat. In recent years, it has been blamed for 600,000 to 800,000 annual hospitalizations and 50,000 to 60,000 deaths.
Globally, flu activity in China, Europe and elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere is very low. And that follows reports of minor flu in South Africa, Australia and other countries during the winter months in the Southern Hemisphere from May to August.
The story has, of course, been different with the coronavirus, which has 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 drop began.
However, flu-related hospitalizations are only a fraction of what they would have, even during a very mild season, said Brammer, who oversees the CDC’s tracking of the virus.
Flu death data for the entire U.S. population is difficult to collect quickly, but CDC officials are keeping a running count of childhood deaths. One childhood death from flu has been reported so far this season, compared to 92 at the same point in last year’s flu season.
“Many parents will tell you that their kids have been as healthy this year as they’ve ever been, because they don’t swim in the germ hole in the same way in school or daycare as they did in previous years,” said Mick.
Some doctors say they’ve even stopped sending samples for testing because they think no flu is present. Nonetheless, many labs use a CDC-developed “multiplex test” that checks specimens for both the coronavirus and the flu, Brammer said.
More than 190 million doses of flu vaccines have been distributed this season, but the rate of infections is so low that it is difficult for CDC to calculate annually how well the vaccine works, Brammer said. There just isn’t enough data, she said.
That’s also a challenge for planning the flu vaccine for next season. Such work usually begins with identifying which strains of flu are circulating around the world and predicting which of them are likely to prevail in the coming year.
“But there aren’t many (flu) viruses to look at,” Brammer said.
The Associated Press Department of Health and Science is supported by the Science Education Department of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The AP is solely responsible for all content.