Join twindemic battle by getting flu shot

If you prefer your editorials to be of the bumper-sticker variety, here you go: Get a flu shot. If you need a little more convincing, read on. The COVID-19 pandemic dovetailing with a nasty flu season sounds like a fantasy Halloween plot from Hollywood, like simultaneously hurling a hurricane at one coast and wildfires at the other.

Skeptics of steps taken to thwart the coronavirus are probably as likely to see the wisdom in getting a flu shot as they are to wear masks or maintain six feet of space from one another.

In recent years, many hospitals mandate that staff members who decline to get flu shots must — get this — wear masks.

Magical (dark magic) thinking about flu shots persists, like people who declare themselves “immune” to COVID. Deniers of the urgency of the pandemic are fond of pointing out that people die of the flu every year.

They are not wrong. According to the state Department of Health, about 80 people in Connecticut died of the flu since March, when the coronavirus first seized the state. During those same seven months, more than 4,500 people in our state died as a result of COVID-19.

Neither figure is acceptable.

The flu season runs from October through April, meaning COVID and the flu will overlap during the peak influenza months of December to February for the first time.

This won’t be an easy time for anyone on high alert for symptoms, particularly teachers monitoring students who routinely catch colds as the temperatures drop. COVID-19 and the flu both strike the respiratory system, triggering fever spikes and coughing.

Such symptoms only fuel the folly that a flu vaccination can get people sick. Part of the problem (aside from believing everything you read on the internet) is that it’s human nature to get the shot after you start feeling bad. The vaccination can take a couple weeks to kick in, enough time for the flu to take hold.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention experts estimate getting a shot reduces the risk of contracting the flu by between 40 percent and 60 percent.

If you were told you’d have a 40-60 percent chance of winning the lottery, you’d play it, right?

That the percentage isn’t higher should underscore the scope of the challenge experts around the globe face in trying to develop a COVID cure.

The threat of this twindemic should only motivate more people to get their flu shots. It won’t convince everyone. But the millions who have followed protocol by wearing masks and the like are also likely diminishing the spread of the flu this winter.

If you won’t get this shot for yourself, get it for others. The vaccine is estimated to reduce childhood deaths due to the flu by 50 percent.

And if you’re prone to skipping to the end of editorials, we offer the same shorthand we started with: Get the flu shot.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention experts estimate getting a shot reduces the risk of contracting the flu by between 40 percent and 60 percent. If you were told you’d have a 40-60 percent chance of winning the lottery, you’d play it, right?