COVID battle’s unexpected healthy outcomes
It may not seem possible that a pandemic that has taken more than 700,000 U.S. lives could provide some healthy byproducts, but the glass-half-full crowd could point to a few encouraging developments.
Precautions taken to fight COVID-19, including wearing masks and distancing, likely have contributed to the steep decline in domestic flu cases, according to experts.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that it had logged just 1,316 positive flu cases in its surveillance network from September 2020 to the end of January 2021. During that same period the previous year, the CDC had recorded nearly 130,000 cases.
Stephen Kissler, a research fellow in the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a February 11, 2021, Vox article that while more people received a flu vaccine this year, the sharp drop in cases was probably largely driven by maskwearing and social distancing. Kissler suggested that wearing masks could be an effective way of helping control future flu outbreaks.
Neutralizing the flu isn’t the only positive reaction to the coronavirus.
Teen vaping plummeted this year, when COVID forced most students to learn remotely, according to a government report released last week.
U.S. health officials urged caution in interpreting the numbers, collected by using an online questionnaire for the first time. But outside experts believe in the validity of the big drop in electronic-cigarette use, which makes sense given the social nature of vaping.
“They found a dramatic drop from last year and it’s hard to imagine that doesn’t represent a real decrease in use among highschool and middle-school students,” Dr. Nancy Rigotti of Harvard University — who was not involved in the research — told the Associated Press.
In the national survey, 11% of high school-students and less than 3% of middle-schoolers said they used e-cigarettes and other vaping products recently, the Food and Drug Administration and CDC reported.
That’s a roughly 40% drop from last year, when nearly 20% of high school students and 5% of middle schoolers said they’d recently vaped.
If this year’s numbers hold up, it would be the second big drop in a row, from a peak of 28% for highschoolers in 2019.
That’s because even before the pandemic, new mandates helped curb underage use of e-cigarettes. In late 2019, a new federal law raised the purchase age for all tobacco and vaping products from 18 to 21. Shortly thereafter, the FDA banned nearly all flavors from small, cartridge-based e-cigarettes, the catalyst for the teen vaping craze.
Those measures, combined with a rash of highly publicized vapingrelated illnesses and deaths caused by a filler in black-market vaping liquids that contained THC, had a cumulative effect on demand.
Previous surveys were conducted solely in classrooms, while the most recent polling contained responses from students both at home and in school.
For months, tobacco experts have speculated about the potential effect of school closures on vaping, given most teens vape with their friends and get e-cigarettes from their peers.
Dr. Rigotti said the decline will have to be confirmed by other surveys due out later this year. It’s also hard to predict whether vaping could rebound now that most schools have returned to in-person classes.
No collateral health benefits can compensate for this country’s 700,000-plus deaths and nearly 44 million COVID cases, but coronavirus-created changes in behavior — as these flu and vaping statistics suggest — could emerge as the silver lining in this COVID cloud.