Jaime Green writes:

Two years of pandemic have us primed to panic at every headline. A new variant, a new complication, a new baffling policy move. Now, headlines have brought an alarmingly exotic new word to stoke our fears: flurona.

On Sunday the Times of Israel published an article with the headline, “‘Flurona’: Israel Records Its First Case of Patient With COVID and Flu at Same Time.” The first wave of follow-up aggregation articles in other outlets was staid, merely repeating the report. But soon enough the combination of anxiety and pandemic exhaustion led headline writers into a strange cutesy fearmongering: The Daily Beast grimly christened flurona “2022’s Hottest New Illness” and the Cut’s headline asked, “What Fresh Hell Is ‘Flurona’?”

The thing is, though, it’s not a fresh hell at all. (And sure enough, most articles about flurona get to that fact a few paragraphs in.) The Atlantic reported on flu-COVID coinfections in November, tracing them back as far as February 2020, among the first cases of COVID in the U.S. In addition to not being particularly fresh, it’s not much of a hell at all, comparatively. Israel’s first flu-COVID case, the story that triggered this latest wave of reporting, was mild even though the patient was unvaccinated and pregnant. [Continue reading…]