I haven’t seen this posted, but apologies if it has been and I’ve missed it. I guess this fits into this thread, though somewhat oddly: a realistic look at present and future flu in a COVID world, both in terms of type and frequency.
How COVID-19 is changing the cold and flu season was published in Nature last December. It reflects on how measures such as masking and social distancing are affecting the current flu seasons (and other conditions, but I’ll concentrate on flu); and what the knock-on effects in future seasons might be.
If this year’s flu season does fizzle out in the Northern Hemisphere, that could make it harder to predict the right strains to put in 2021’s flu vaccine. It could also have intriguing, longer-term consequences. Webby speculates that a low-flu season might kill off less-common variants of influenza. “A lot of different flus have been circulating in recent years. Are they all going to make it out of this or not?” he asks. “It’s possible that what this season will do is actually make the virological picture a lot simpler. That may be permanent, potentially.”
At the same time, Webby adds, the lack of viral competition in human hosts could conceivably open a door for new swine-flu variants in the future. “We get a handful of those every year, in the agricultural-fair season,” Webby says. “One of the things holding those viruses back a lot is natural immunity. If flu is low for a few seasons, that might leave a gap for swine viruses to have more impact.”
“I am sure that flu will come back with a vengeance at some stage in the future,” says Robert Ware, a clinical epidemiologist at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, “but it might take a few years.”
My bold.
So the measures we take to protect us from COVID may, in the near future, make protecting ourselves from the flu more difficult.
For the record, here’s a more recent article which makes similar arguments.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/01/covid-19-measures-also-suppress-flu-now
j