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Is the COVID-19 pandemic over? Not yet, experts have some big surprises for you. As winter looms and hospitals across the U.S. continue to be deluged with severe cases of COVID-19, flu season presents a particularly ominous threat this year. A group of researchers with expertise in vaccination policy and mathematical modeling of infectious disease, who has been modeling influenza for over a decade, said that the war is not over yet and some new big threats are waiting for us.
Flu Cases Could Surge In This Coming Season
In a recent study, the researchers stated that their recent model suggests that last year’s tamped-down influenza season could lead to a surge in flu cases this coming season.
Anti-COVID-19 Strategies Reduced Flu Too
Ever since COVID cases were first reported from China’s Wuhan city in 2019, many measures to curb the spread/transmission of the virus were put into place, such as limiting travel, wearing masks, social distancing, closing schools, and other strategies.
As a result of these numerous restrictions, many countries saw a dramatic decrease in influenza and other infectious diseases during the last flu season.
According to the reports, in the USA, flu-related deaths in kids dropped from nearly 200 in the 2019-2020 season to one in the 2020-2021 season. Overall, the 2020-2021 flu season had one of the lowest recorded numbers of cases in recent history.
Flu Could Hit Harder This Year
While flu reduction is a good thing, it could mean that the flu will hit harder than normal this winter. This is because much of the natural immunity that people develop to disease comes from the spread of that disease through a population. Many other respiratory viruses demonstrated a similar drop during the pandemic, and some of those, including interseasonal respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, have increased dramatically as schools have reopened and social distancing, masking, and other measures have declined.
Influenza Involves Multiple Factors Know All Here
Immunity to influenza involves multiple factors. Influenza is generally caused by several strains of an RNA virus that divides or in medical terms mutates at various type of rates every year, to form new strains of the virus. It mutates in a manner, not unlike the mutations that are occurring in SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
The level of an individual’s body’s existing immunity to the current year’s strain of flu depends on a lot of variables. What are they? These factors include
- How similar the current strain is to the one that a child was first exposed to
- Whether circulating strains are similar to previously experienced strains and
- How recent those influenza infections were if they occurred.
- Mass gatherings. Human interactions are also one of the most important pillars of several factors. Mass gatherings include children crowding together in classrooms or people attending large gatherings.
- Another most important one is the use of protective measures like wearing a mask all affect whether a virus is transmitted between people.
There are also variables due to vaccination. Population immunity from vaccination depends on the proportion of people who get the flu vaccine in a given season and how effective – or well-matched – that vaccine is against the circulating influenza strains.
Large Epidemic of Flu Could Hit The World This Year
In a recent study, the researchers suggested that the world could see a large epidemic of flu this season. Paired with the existing threat of the highly infectious delta variant, this could result in a dangerous combination of infectious diseases or a “twindemic.”
Models of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases have been at the forefront of predictions about the COVID-19 pandemic, and have often proved to be predictive of cases, hospitalizations, and death. But there are no historical examples of this type of dual and simultaneous epidemics. As a result, traditional epidemiological and statistical methods are not well suited to project what may occur this season. Therefore, models that incorporate the mechanisms of how a virus spreads are better able to make predictions.
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