If you did not catch the flu this year — and there is an overwhelming chance that you did not — you have COVID-19 to thank.
It’s a small consolation, given the enormously disruptive scope of the pandemic. But it’s the focus of a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Public Health by two Concordia researchers and their colleagues that studies the 2020 influenza figures from Canada, the United States, Australia and Brazil. The authors show there is a clear relationship between the implementation of COVID-mitigation measures such as hand-washing, masking and social distancing and the spread of the annual flu.
They write that these preventive measures all but eliminated the flu in countries where it can kill tens of thousands of people a year, even as cases of COVID-19 soared.
“With the introduction of COVID-19 mitigation measures, we saw a steep decline in influenza cases in the northern hemisphere,” says Jovana Stojanovic, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Health, Kinesiology and Applied Physiology and the lead author of the paper.
“Then we also observed that as COVID-19 cases went up and down in different ways, influenza was basically annulled across both the north and south hemispheres. That speaks volumes about how contagious COVID-19 is compared to influenza.”
Simon Bacon, a professor of health, kinesiology and applied physiology, co-authored the paper, along with Vincent Boucher and Kim Lavoie at UQAM as well as Jacqueline Boyle and Joanne Enticott of Monash University in Australia.