Throughout this year, the biggest worry for healthcare planners has been what happens if a second wave of Covid-19 coincides with a winter flu epidemic. We are now in what looks like a second wave of Covid-19 – and October is the month when flu cases tend to start rising. So are we on the edge of a vast deep abyss?
Not if the experience of the southern hemisphere winter is anything to go by. A paper in the Lancet led by the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand analyses this year’s influenza season – and observes that it was virtually non-existent.
The researchers looked up cases of flu reported on FluNet, the global influenza surveillance and response system and found remarkably low levels of the disease this year. Australia, for example, registered 21,156 cases and 36 deaths – compared with 298,120 cases and 812 deaths at this stage in 2019.
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