The vaccine topic, of course, is in demand. But today I decided to take a little break from her. Sunday all the same! And everyone missed the good news.
And there is good news. Not so that “fell from the sky.” Many people, including me, talked about this possibility. But now there is already concrete data – in the countries of the southern hemisphere, the “influenza season” seems to be the happiest in the entire history of observations.
In the countries of the southern hemisphere, as you know, when we have summer, there is winter. Accordingly, the flu season there is from May to October and it is “tied” to only one year (and we still have the 2020/21 season ahead). One picture is worth many words. Below are two graphs. The first is the incidence of influenza in Australia in 2015-2020. The second is the same in New Zealand. These two countries have very good morbidity statistics (weekly). Therefore, I selected data for these countries. Graphs (slightly modified) taken from an article in The Economist. Primary data were obtained from WHO reference laboratories in these countries and are available on the WHO website.
Those wishing to see similar charts for some other countries of the southern hemisphere can find them here:
Although the flu season in the southern hemisphere is not over yet, the picture is already clear – COVID has almost “canceled” the flu. The reason is also quite obvious – tough anti-epidemic measures. They, despite the huge number of their violations, sometimes the delay, on average, significantly reduced the spread of respiratory viral infections. Never before have seasonal flu been fought with such harsh measures (for reference: according to WHO estimates, 300-650 thousand people die annually from influenza). Because influenza is more closely monitored than other respiratory infections, this pattern was quickly identified.
