I’m wondering how everyone is faring this cold and flu season. With everyone wearing masks, social distancing, and washing their hands more often and more thoroughly, I wouldn’t think many people are getting sick (non-Covid) this winter. No one in my circle has been sick including me. Is anyone out there suffering a cold or flu?
Not me, and I almost always get a nasty bug of some sort in the winter as I use public transport a lot. Now that I’m working from home, and driving wherever I need to go, wearing a mask and sanitising regularly, I’ve not had the faintest sniffle.
If the assertion is that social distancing has been so effective against transmission of Covid that it must be working for other diseases too, I think I see a flaw in the premise. Nevertheless, it does seem to be true that flu infections are lower this year than in previous years, partly due to social distancing among school children, and partly due to a higher vaccination rate this year.
Every year, I usually get a cold before December, and then mid-January. This year, I didn’t. Now, honestly, I attribute that more to the fact that there’s no coworkers in our office bringing in the germs from their kids, but that is a result of the Covid stay-at-home practices.
Influenza and nonCOVID-19-related pneumonic disease is way down this year despite the fact that initial predictions for the season were expected to approach the epidemic threshold, as they did in 2019 prior to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Mask-wearing and handwashing probably has something to do with this, although the obvious favor is the “social distancing”, and in particular school closures and work from home, as schools and workplaces are the largest contributors to the spread of respiratory pathogens.
This is an argument for continuing the trend of allowing office workers to work from home whenever they are feeling ill or when contagion is spreading as well as enhanced monitoring of school and college aged students. As bad as this pandemic has been, a really virulent and highly transmissible influenza A pandemic could easily have an order of magnitude greater mortality and would put stranglehold on normal economic and educational activity as well as totally overwhelming hospitals and medical facilities. Epidemiologists and virologists have been warning about this kind of threat for decades, and the relative love tap of SARS-C0V-2 is a wakeup call that governments need to devote more time a d effort on epidemic surveillance and containment.
Stranger