Next year's flu shot...complications

[magnus]

A side effect to all the attention on the coronavirus is that the flu has basically been non-existent this year.

An interview with the Seattle Flu Study head, it was revealed that while last flu season, 114 people died from the flu in Washington state, 0 have perished thus far this year.

https://kuow.org/stories/drastic-drop-in...strictions


Also UW has tested 40 thousand samples from covid testing and only 4 came back positive

Great news, right?

Yes, and well, not fully.  

Yes. It is going to be much more difficult to develop next year's flu vaccine. The way that flu vaccine strain selection works, how we pick the pieces that go into the flu vaccine, is that we look at what's been circulating around the world.

The good news is that there are four pieces of the flu vaccine because most people get what's called a Quadrivalent Vaccine and that three of those four actually don't change very much from year to year. So those three will not be hard to predict.

[magnus]

A more national report:

https://apnews.com/article/flu-has-disap...9a324f398d

[akiddoc]

On the other hand, since influenza is reduced worldwide, we may very well have another light year of influenza next year.

I have had one child test positive for Flu in my practice this winter.

I have not seen a single pneumonia.

I have not seen a single ear infection.

I have seen more urinary tract infections than all other bacterial infections put together this winter.

Absolutely the most bizarre year of medicine ever.

It will be interesting to see what the future ramifications are for infectious disease in this country. We've never seen a one year interruption in the flow of disease like this.

In spite of the almost complete interruption of most infection transmission, Covid keeps spreading, which illustrates how infectious it truly is.

[M_T]

akiddoc, by any chance, are you saying that UTIs are more prevalent this year than normal, or is it only that most everything else is just not spreading and so UTIs are the most common infections?

I presume colds (non-flu) are relatively rare this year.

Although my wife & I have been rarely out of the house for just under a year.  And we've got a HEPA air filter running continuously in our bedroom.  Until recently, it was too cold to open the windows or doors.  But we've still had a fair amount of congestion, coughs, and runny noses.

I think that shows that our bodies are putting us in a state in which a COVID or flu or cold could find a good environment to take hold, and then to spread from us.  I always thought of those as consequences of an infection (and, probably an infection increases these symptoms) but now see they may be independent.

Actually, in two different games, I noticed a particular basketball player touch his/her nose at the foul line as if bothered by a runny or stuffy nose.