https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-measures-have-all-but-wiped-out-the-flu-in-the-southern-hemisphere-11595440682

The flu has disappeared!!!

For the past two months, as winter descended on Chile, infectious-disease specialist Claudia Cortés worked tirelessly to keep a wave of ill Covid-19 patients alive in the hospital where she works. At the same time, she worried about what would happen when the usual wave of influenza patients arrived.

They never came.

From Argentina to South Africa to New Zealand, countries in the Southern Hemisphere are reporting far lower numbers of influenza and other seasonal respiratory viral infections this year.

In some countries, the flu seems to have all but disappeared.

The decline isn’t just for flu, but for other respiratory viruses as well, such as respiratory syncytial virus, which largely affects children, and pneumococcal disease.

“We keep checking for the other viruses, but all we’re seeing is Covid,” said Dr. Cortés, the Chilean doctor. Of roughly 1,300 Covid-19 patients she has treated since late March, only a handful had the flu. “We were surprised by the decline in the other viruses like influenza. We never dreamed it would practically disappear,” she said.

Chile has recorded only 1,134 seasonal respiratory infections so far this year, compared with 20,949 during the same period last year. In the first two weeks of July—the equivalent to early January in the Northern Hemisphere and the height of the local flu season—the country reported no new confirmed influenza cases.

In the last two weeks of June, Australia registered only 85 new laboratory-confirmed influenza cases, compared with 22,047 confirmed cases for the two weeks through June 30 a year earlier, according to Australia’s National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System.

In New Zealand, there are fewer hospitalizations than normal at this time of year, and the death rate has fallen.

“This [decline of other respiratory viruses] surprised me,” said Dr. Sylvain Aldighieri, deputy director of the Department of Health Emergencies at the Pan American Health Organization, the Western Hemisphere arm of the World Health Organization. “We were expecting a double burden of cases, because in countries like Chile and Argentina, the flu winter epidemic places a high burden on health-care services.”

In Australia, influenza cases usually begin rising in March, April and May. Then, in June, “things really start to get going,” said Professor Ian Barr, deputy director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza at the Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, a nonprofit research center in Melbourne.
But instead, the number of influenza cases has tapered off, from around 15% of the five-year average in March to just 4% of the five-year average in June, he said. In Australia, confirmed flu cases plunged 84% to 20,739 from the beginning of January to June 30, compared with 132,424 during the same period the previous year.

In Argentina, the number of laboratory-confirmed flu cases fell 64% to 151,189 from January through early July, compared with an average of 420,737 during the same period the previous five years, according to government figures.

“Covid has displaced all the other viruses, which makes me certain that it is far more transmissible,” said Dr. Gustavo Lopardo, an infectious-disease specialist and professor at the University of Buenos Aires.

Even in countries that have struggled to contain the virus, like Brazil, the winter flu season was far more mild. Brazil has had more than 80,000 coronavirus-related deaths, but saw flu cases fall by about 40% and flu deaths by half.

In South Africa, which has been under a strict lockdown for three months, there were never enough flu cases to say a seasonal epidemic had begun, say doctors there.
“We are certainly pushing the bounds of when it should have started now so I think it’s correct to assume that this is a real phenomenon,” said Richard Lessells, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

The country of 60 million people usually sees some 50,000 severe flu cases a year, leading to around 12,000 deaths.

New Zealand’s flu-surveillance program indicates only 0.7% of the population had influenza-like symptoms such as fever and cough in the first week of July, a fraction of the 3.0% to 4.3% range for the previous two years in June and July. The decline has meant lower than normal hospitalizations overall, even with coronavirus patients counted.

In the Auckland region, the weekly hospitalization rate was down to two people per 100,000 by mid-July compared with the long-term average of 8.5 for this time of year. It is also the lowest since a tracking program for acute respiratory infections began in the Auckland region in 2012.
For influenza itself, there have been zero hospitalizations in the Auckland region—home to a third of New Zealanders—since late March.

TOTAL Deaths have also fallen, by about 5% in the first half of the year compared with the previous year and are also down from 2018 and 2017. Researchers at the University of Otago said the reduced deaths are “unlikely to be a chance finding” and could be linked to several factors stemming from the lockdown, including lower levels of respiratory illness, fewer road crashes, reduced air pollution and a decline in fatal work accidents.

However, the researchers said it is possible deaths will rebound later on due to factors such as delayed cancer treatment and higher unemployment, which is associated with increased suicide and cardiovascular disease.

And in New Zealand, which has lifted virtually all coronavirus restrictions, Dr. Jefferies cautioned that there were still a few more months of winter and spring left and that greater economic activity could lead to an uptick in influenza in coming months, especially if people get careless about social distancing.

INTERESTING INTERESTING. Coronavirus is here, flu has gone, and total deaths around the world have GONE DOWN!!!