Widespread masking, lockdowns, and other measures that helped squelch the coronavirus in countries such as Australia appear to have wiped out other respiratory viruses too.
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The drastic behavioral changes that the pandemic has forced the world to adopt have almost certainly played a role. But even after witnessing a similar drought of viruses in the North, scientists remain unsure of the reasons behind the shift. Similar dynamics played out first in the Southern Hemisphere, where winter stretches from June to August, with countries and cities in South America, Africa, and Australia reporting vanishingly low case numbers. The uneasy détente with these viruses in the United States isn’t entirely unprecedented. On the virological scoreboard, the only pathogen that’s truly had a good year is the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. Other respiratory viruses have fallen away as well, among them respiratory syncytial virus, parainfluenza viruses, even other coronaviruses that cause common colds-nearly all of the usual suspects behind the fevers, coughs, and sniffles that typically rear their head this time of year.
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“It’s really quite extraordinary,” says Helen Chu, the head of the study and an immunologist and epidemiologist at the University of Washington. The Seattle Flu Study, too, is still diligently screening people for the flu to ensure that it’s not flying under the radar of the 6,000 tests the team has run, only two have come back positive. The 40,000 coronavirus tests, however, have returned about 6,000 positives. But Graf’s team has done about 7,000 influenza tests since November, and only one has been positive. “I would have thought that if people can get COVID, people can get flu.” These viruses transmit in much the same way, attack similar parts of the body, and even cause similar symptoms. “We have so much COVID circulating here in Arizona,” says Erin Graf, the director of clinical microbiology at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona. This quiet is a jarring departure, not just from typical flu seasons, but also from the crush of the coronavirus. The flu’s recent disappearing act has left an eerie lull in labs that were fearing the worst for months. And no one’s quite sure when, or how, they will return. Without flu cases to study, researchers have been starved of data crucial for developing vaccines and forecasting the next outbreak. But the flu’s absence is also unsettling. Fewer flu cases mean fewer deaths, fewer occupied hospital beds, and fewer overtaxed health-care workers, caregivers, and laboratory employees-a welcome respite for a country still in the coronavirus’s grip.
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This winter has, so far, been the quietest flu season in recent memory, and the perks are clear. Now those maps remain almost entirely green, indicating low or minimal flu activity. By the middle of the 2019–20 flu season, positivity rates were cresting at about 25 or 30 percent, mottling federal flu-activity maps in shades of red and orange, which denote the virus’s rampant spread. This time last year, close to 100 times as many flu cases had been identified from nearly the same number of tests. Since early fall, about 800,000 laboratory samples have been tested in the United States for the flu and reported to the CDC, and only 1,500 or so have come up positive-a mere 0.2 percent. While the coronavirus has surged, the flu and other respiratory viruses have flickered out.
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The same baffling trend is repeating itself nationwide, and around the globe. “I fully expected there to be a typical influenza season this year.” “It’s absolutely remarkable,” Binnicker, the Mayo Clinic’s director of clinical virology, told me. The lab has run 20,000 flu tests-10 times as many as it processed the season before-and zero have come back positive. But the tally for the flu has held constant. In the two months since, thousands of tests have turned up positive for the coronavirus. On December 1, the team began screening all patients with respiratory symptoms for both viruses. The coronavirus had already infected an estimated 13 million people nationwide, and his team at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, was now peering over the precipice of flu season, when every coughing, feverish patient would need not one diagnostic test, but two.ĭetermined to stay one step ahead, Binnicker’s lab had worked furiously to develop its own influenza test in order to amp up capacity. In November, as fall was fading, Matt Binnicker began to hunker down for a hard winter.