Hospitals saw only a few weak hopes during the COVID-19 pandemic – a dramatic drop in flu and other respiratory illnesses among them. But a year without the flu can really be a problem for vaccine developers and disease predictors, as well as for people who have spent an entire year without strengthening their immune system against respiratory diseases, The Atlantic reports.
When 2020 ended and the pandemic began to overlap with the start of a typical flu season, the Mayo Clinic was among the hospitals that started testing patients with respiratory symptoms for COVID-19 and flu. But among the 20,000 flu tests he performed between December 1 and February 1, none were positive. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention similarly reported a positive flu rate of just 0.2 percent among 800,000 laboratory samples reported across the country.
Although the fall of flu was great news for crowded hospitals, it was not helpful for scientists who monitor the flu’s constant mutations. Virologists and vaccinologists typically scan mountains of samples from around the world to predict what the next year’s dominant strain will look like and make vaccines to fight it, said Stacey Schultz-Cherry, virologist and immunologist at St. Jude Children’s Hospital The Atlantic. A year without exposure to the virus can also be problematic for the human immune system, and especially for children who have been exposed to few, if any, varieties of the flu.
Scientists may not have the best view of what’s going on with the flu right now. But Florian Krammer, a virologist and flu specialist at the Icahn School of Medicine in Mount Sinai, suggested two possibilities. Fortunately, the lack of circulation of flu “can end up strangling circulating strains – possibly even taking away one of its functions”, The Atlantic writes. But it is also possible that the flu family tree could split into two, creating a strain that scientists don’t even know about until it goes viral. Read more at The Atlantic.
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