Password: get vaccinated. And not only against covid, but also against seasonal flu: according to Jenny Harries, director of the UK Health Security Agency, “whoever is infected with covid and flu at the same time will run twice the risk of dying compared to those who it will only be infected by the new coronavirus: this is what the first studies tell us “. Underlining the uncertain nature of the predictions regarding the upcoming winter (and flu) season, Harries recommends that everyone get vaccinated against the flu: “For the first time the flu will circulate together with the covid, and we will run the risk of getting sick from both” .
Skipped season. It is important to consider that, unlike other years, this year we arrive in winter with a very low immunity against flu viruses: due to the lockdowns imposed to curb the covid coronavirus, last year we actually passed the flu season unscathed. . This year, however, thanks to a gradual return to normality, it will not be so, and we will have to prepare for a double circulation of covid and influenza. “We don’t know which viral strains will prevail this year, and it is likely that we will have more than one unlike in past seasons,” Harries points out.
Unpredictable. Normally, to predict how the flu season will go in our hemisphere, we look at the one just passed in the southern hemisphere: this year, however, it is difficult to make a forecast, because the restrictions have recently been relaxed, and because there are countries like the ‘Australia (which recorded zero deaths from flu, compared to 100-1200 in a normal season) which have been in lockdown all summer. “If anyone claims to know how it will go, they are lying,” warns John Paget of the Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research in Utrecht. The only certainty is doubtDescartes would say: we just have to wait and hope that a “twindemic“(a double epidemic of influenza and covid), as many fear.