Word began coming up from below the equator this summer. Actually, let's call it "our" summer. For the summer in the northern hemisphere is the winter in the southern hemisphere. Hard as though it might seem to an Arkansan in August, many folks in South America and Africa are wearing coats and gloves that time of year. And shoveling snow.
The word that came: The flu wasn't much.
The worldwide pandemic caused by covid-19 has one, and maybe only one, bright side. Because so many folks are wearing masks, socially distancing from one another, and generally avoiding big crowds, the yearly flu has had a harder time jumping from one target to another.
And the word from doctors and health-care number crunchers is that they haven't had much of a flu season, if at all, Down Under.
Now the papers up here are reporting on this side effect. Labs in the United States are still testing for the flu; they're just not finding it.
"We are seeing very low levels of influenza so far," Daniel Jernigan, director of the flu division at the Centers for Disease Control, told The Wall Street Journal. Yes, the CDC has a division devoted to the flu. And should. It kills every year.
The paper said during the first week of December, labs in the United States tested 22,474 people for the flu bug. Only a few dozen came back positive. Americans--at least those in Norteamerica--might not have to worry about the twindemic that officials have worried about since March.
"Flu-related hospitalizations are also down," the Journal reports. "There haven't been enough lab-confirmed hospitalizations to meet the CDC's threshold for beginning to report such data, Dr. Jernigan said. The threshold is 300 hospitalizations. Normally, the U.S. would have passed that mark by now."
So perhaps there is a marketing strategy to be had here, at least when it comes to convincing more people to take these precautions. Surely the flu isn't a hoax. The flu isn't political. Maybe the governor and friends--not to mention restaurants and stores--could ask folks to cover their faces and spread out to prevent covid and the flu. Because we haven't heard of anybody who doesn't believe in influenza.
Yet.
Still, in these latitudes, the flu season is only beginning. And the Arkansas paper has already reported deaths from it. So things can change. But the word from down south is good, at least partially. And in 2020, we'll take what good we can get.