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First, he says, there are the precautions people have been taking for COVID, like masking, social distancing, and frequent hand-washing. Sure, not everybody is doing these things, but many are. “I don’t think we can ignore that,” he says.

Secondly, many people seem to have heeded public health advice to get a flu vaccine.

“At least in Canada, there was massive uptake of the flu vaccine this year,” Bogoch says.

Official numbers on vaccination rates for this year’s flu season aren’t yet available for the U.S., but so far, the CDC says nearly 194 million doses of flu vaccine have been distributed. That’s another record, topping last year’s distribution by about 20 million doses. Distribution isn’t the same as the number of shots going into arms, so it remains to be seen whether high vaccination coverage may have played an important role in tamping down the flu here.

Bogoch also points to less international travel as a reason the flu wasn’t a big deal.

“This is an infection that that follows mobility patterns as well,” he says, “and there's just remarkably less human mobility this year.”

Perhaps the biggest reason for the disappearance of the flu this year has to do with children.


“Children are the great distributors of the influenza virus in our society,” Schaffner says.

Kids shed flu virus for longer than adults do, and they shed it a day or two before they show any symptoms, says Jennifer Nayak, MD, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Rochester Medical School. She has studied the life cycle of flu infections in children.

“As we’ve learned the hard way, with COVID, shedding virus before you are symptomatic makes it really, really hard to contain an infection,” she says.

Young children also don’t “control their secretions,” as Nayak gently puts it. They sneeze and cough and slobber all over the adult caregivers they are still highly dependent on, making them very good at spreading the flu.

anmeno skrev: ↑24 jul 2021, 01:19 Forhåpentligvis så skjønte du at jeg prøvde meg på ironi

Airline easyJet said it is preparing to carry more than 135,000 passengers this weekend from the UK on over 80 routes to green and amber-list destinations across europa
In total 251 of its planes will take to the skies, to popular destinations including Malta, Madeira, Malaga in Spain, Faro and Lisbon in Portugal, and Corfu and Athens in Greece

More than £10billion was wasted on PPE for frontline NHS staff that was “not fit for purpose,” with 2.1 billion items found unsuitable for use in medical settings. This equates to more than £2 billion of taxpayers’ money and five times the estimate of PPE unfit for purpose given to the committee by the DHSC in January.