Missing: One flu season
While Covid-19 continues to infect tens of thousands of Americans every day, another usually rampant respiratory virus is almost nowhere to be seen: influenza. Since the fall, about 800,000 lab flu tests have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Only 1,500 have come back positive, or 0.2 percent, an infection rate 100 times lower than it was 12 months ago. In a typical year, hundreds of thousands of Americans are hospitalized with the flu, but this season’s tally was only 155 as of last week. And only one child has died from the flu so far this year, compared with 78 at this point in 2020. Scientists say the radical behavioral changes that Americans have made during the pandemic—such as social distancing, mask wearing, and constant handwashing—are largely responsible for this unusually quiet flu season. “Flu just tends to be a lot less transmissible [than a coronavirus], which means it’s easier to suppress,” Shweta Bansal, a disease ecologist at Georgetown University, tells The Atlantic. Travel bans have also helped quash influenza, which is often seeded in the Northern Hemisphere in fall by travelers from the Southern Hemisphere. But influenza could still make a late-season return: There’s some evidence infections are increasing in parts of Asia that have eased anti-Covid precautions. “We may not be out of the woods yet,” says Bansal.