Patients admitted to hospital wards because they are positive for Covid-19 and who also have the flu run a 4 times greater risk of having to request ventilation support and are 2.4 times more likely to die than those who have had only Covid. This was explained by a recent study, the results of which were published in the scientific journal “The Lancet”.
The data emerged from the study
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The research work was conducted by scholars from the University of Edinburgh, the University of Liverpool, the University of Leiden and Imperial College London, which involved over 305,000 patients hospitalized with Covid-19. And, according to what emerged, the researchers stressed the need for more flu tests to be performed in hospital on coronavirus positive patients, while stressing the importance of a complete vaccination both against Covid and against the flu itself. The team of experts, in particular, examined the data of adult patients admitted to hospital, due to Covid-19, in the United Kingdom and in the period between 6 February 2020 and 8 December 2021. The results of the tests have found respiratory viral co-infections in 6965 patients with Covid-19 and 227 of these also had the flu virus, with significantly more severe outcomes.
The combination of Covid-19 and flu viruses
According to Maaike Swets, an expert at the University of Edinburgh and one of the signatories of the study, “in the last two years we have often seen patients with Covid-19 become seriously ill, sometimes leading to hospitalization in intensive care and the use of an artificial ventilator. to help with breathing “. For the scholar that “an influenza infection could give rise to a similar situation was already known, but less was known about the outcomes of a double infection with Sars-Cov-2 and other respiratory viruses”. From the comment of Kenneth Baillie, professor of experimental medicine at the Scottish university, it was understood that the researchers “discovered that the combination of Covid-19 and flu viruses is particularly dangerous. This will be important as many countries will decrease the use of social distancing and containment measures ”. Also for this reason, experts expect Covid-19 to “circulate with the flu, increasing the chances of co-infection. And therefore we should change our testing strategy for Covid-19 patients in hospital and test the flu in a much broader way ”, reiterated the expert.
The importance of vaccines
For Professor Malcolm Semple, a lecturer in epidemic medicine and child health at the University of Liverpool, a surprise was given “by the fact that the risk of death has more than doubled when people have been infected with both the flu and from the Covid-19 virus “. Based on the findings, he added, it is now particularly “important that people are fully vaccinated and potentiated against both viruses and not leave it until it is too late.” The researchers’ confirmation, in conclusion, is therefore that the vaccines that protect against Covid-19 and the flu are different and that people need both. It therefore appears necessary, in this perspective, to test for the presence of other viruses in cases where there is a diagnosis relating to a respiratory infection in patients admitted to hospitals.