Flu season never came to the Southern Hemisphere this year
The run-up to flu season in the US has been fraught with fear. Health experts worry that fighting Covid-19 and influenza simultaneously could burden the health care system’s ability to treat both infections.
Flu season in the Southern Hemisphere, though, came and went with so few cases that there was “virtually no influenza circulation,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
CDC experts believe that efforts like social distancing, mask-wearing and school closures might have critically crippled flu season in countries in the Southern Hemisphere.
The Northern Hemisphere — particularly the US, where as many as 56 million people might have been infected with the flu last season — can learn from the Southern Hemisphere’s response to Covid-19, which might have prevented a massive flu outbreak, CDC experts wrote in a report last month. [Continue reading…]