Flu, other infections down, likely due to COVID-19 rules
The usual broken bones and other trauma are being treated this winter at the emergency department of St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. But one category of medical complaints has all but disappeared: infectious disease.
Take influenza, for example. Typically between December and April, nurses and doctors at the Philadelphia hospital see hundreds of children with the flu. So far this winter, the number is zero.
Flu numbers for Pennsylvania, New Jersey and the United States as a whole also are well below normal across all ages, though far from zero. Likewise, the country has seen few cases of acute flaccid myelitis, a form of childhood paralysis that is thought to be caused by viral infection. The rate of that illness typically spikes in the fall of evennumber years, with 238 confirmed cases in 2018, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet in 2020, there were just 29.
Call it the upside of life in a pandemic. While several factors could be at work in these downward disease trends, a key driver is almost certainly the various precautions that remain in place for COVID-19, physicians say.
“Wearing masks, social distancing, staying home, children not being in school together,” said Emily Souder, an infectious diseases specialist at St. Chris. “All that happening at the same time has definitely impacted lots of respiratory viruses.”
In Pennsylvania, 2,195 confirmed cases of flu were reported to the state Department of Health from late September through Jan. 16. In many years, the state sees three times that many flu cases in just one week.
When flu rates are down in any given year, a variety of factors can play a role.
The predominant strains may be similar to strains that have circulated in the recent past, meaning more people have at least partial immunity. Or the vaccine may be an especially good match for the strains in question, and perhaps more people than usual choose to get it.
That may be happening this winter. Concerned that emergency rooms would be swamped with a double whammy of flu and COVID cases, public health officials have made an especially strong effort to encourage the flu vaccine. As of Jan. 1, 192.5 million flu vaccine doses already had been distributed in the United States, compared with 174.5 million doses for the entire 2019-20 season, the CDC says.
And two late-December surveys found that 53% to 54% of adults had gotten the flu vaccine, compared with 42% in December 2019, though coverage was lower in some minority groups, the agency said.
But could a flu surge still be on the way this winter? The disease is generally in full swing by this time of year, but not always. The low level of flu so far this season is similar to what was seen in the winter of 2015-16, when cases started to rise in late February.
Still, evidence so far suggests the COVID precautions are helping to keep the flu in check, said Ray Barishansky, deputy secretary of health preparedness and community protection at the Pennsylvania Department of Health.
“I do think that the washing of hands, the avoidance of gatherings, wearing masks, these are things that definitely reduce the spread of flu,” he said.