In the midst of a global health pandemic, ordinary flu season did not hit

Despite warnings, a flu season that wasn't As the nation suffered through a devastating winter surge of coronavirus cases, the phones at Old Dominion Pediatrics in Virginia rang off the hook. Reid Wilson TheHill

Public health experts, general practitioners and pediatricians had warned for months that a surge in coronavirus cases over the winter months would be compounded by a typical flu season, which kills tens of thousands Americans annually. But a funny thing happened in the midst of a global health pandemic: Flu season was effectively canceled.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows just 1,893 Americans have tested positive for the influenza virus this year, between clinical laboratory results and public health labs. By this point last year, more than 290,000 people had tested positive for influenza.

The CDC reported in August that 198 children had died from influenza-related causes during the last flu season, a record high. So far this year, only one child has died, the lowest tally since records started being kept in 2004.

“You’d never think there would be a silver lining to this [pandemic], but this is about as close to a silver lining as there has been,” said Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College. “That’s what wearing masks and social distancing and probably reduced in-person classes [does].”

Fewer than 1 in 1,000 hospitalizations this year have been for influenza, one-seventh the proportion recorded in the last low-severity flu season in 2011-2012. ...

Over the past twelve months, with the exception of some countries in West Africa and some countries in Southeastern Asia, no one’s had a flu season. And that’s in countries that shut down really strictly, it’s in countries that maybe haven’t shut down as strictly. That confounds me a little bit," said Richard Webby, director of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Collaborating Center for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

The same thing has appeared to happen in the United States. Influenza is less transmissible than the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, meaning masks and social distancing likely has an even greater impact on the overall number of flu cases than on the coronavirus. School shutdowns meant curbing one of the most prolific vectors of person-to-person transmission.