Flu was all but eliminated in South Africa this year. Coronavirus is to thank.

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Wed, 2020-08-19 13:46 — mike kraft

Flu was all but eliminated in South Africa this year. Coronavirus is to thank. Simple protective measures have stopped flu. But the coronavirus is far more contagious. Lesley Wroughton, Max Bearak Washington Post

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — The pandemic has made a lot of bad things worse, but South Africa's near-total lack of a flu season this year stands out as a rare positive effect.

The country’s National Institute for Communicable Diseases (NICD) has three laboratories that would normally record more than 1,000 cases of flu between April and August, winter in the Southern Hemisphere. As the 2020 season ends, they have recorded just one.

“It is a totally unprecedented event to not see flu,” said Cheryl Cohen, who leads NICD’s respiratory disease team. While she and other experts in South Africa said some people were certainly staying home and not reporting mild sicknesses, they all agreed that South Africa basically skipped its flu season — and that the coronavirus is to thank.

“The main explanation is that measures against coronavirus are having an impact on flu transmission,” Cohen said.

s Northern Hemisphere countries including the United States ramp up the largest effort to vaccinate hundreds of millions of people against the seasonal flu, Southern Hemisphere countries are providing evidence of how basic protective measures such as mask-wearing and school closures, now instituted to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus, could suppress or even eliminate the flu, which kills millions of people every year.

From New Zealand to Australia, Argentina, Chile and South Africa, reported cases of flu have sharply decreased. The hemisphere’s biggest countries implemented stringent coronavirus measures, partly out of fear that the flu and coronavirus would spread simultaneously, overwhelming hospitals. They put heavy lockdowns in place, banned entry to foreigners and closed schools.

The effectiveness of coronavirus measures in preventing flu transmission has left doctors in South Africa with a riddle: Why did they stop flu in its tracks while South Africa ended up in the top five countries globally for coronavirus cases, which now stand at nearly 600,000? ...

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