The flu has flown

Posted on by

From Flu-zero: More than a year since Australia’s last flu death.

A graph of annual influenza deaths in Australia.

Influenza experts never thought they would see the scenario currently unfolding in Australia.

In a month when flu cases are normally rising to a peak, no deaths have been reported anywhere in the country for the year to date. And according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the last Australian death officially attributed to influenza was recorded in July 2020.

Professor Ian Barr is the Deputy Director of the World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza at the Doherty Institute. He is frank when asked if he ever imagined the current situation; just 435 cases notified to the Australian Influenza Surveillance Report so far this year and no hospital admissions.

‘No. It’s amazing. Never,’ he told newsGP.

And this is the only comment on the site, by one assumes a medical doctor, Dr Edgard Arslan. He wrote:

It is interesting how the Influenza has gone by more 95% world wide , since COVID emerged in 2020. Maybe the restrictions , social distancing and wearing masks has played a big role in the disappearance of influenza ,but it didn’t work for COVID ???.what kind of flu vaccine are we going to give next year (2022) ?. what strain is it going to be covered ??.are we covered with the same vaccine from 2021? is influenza going to disappear for good ??all those questions with out answers so far . we just have to wait and see.

2 thoughts on “The flu has flown”

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.