Interesting article which gives me the excuse to share my personal Covid(?) history. I live in a small Guatemalan town that was, pre-Covid, establishing itself as a Central American stop on the musical events tourist trail. In March of 2020 an event was staged which brought some 300 paid ticket holders to town for a three day event. I believe they were mostly Europeans. In this time period I exhibited the following symptoms: I awoke one night struggling for breath. My bed was sweat soaked. I had a raging fever, far exceeding any of the "night sweats" I had previously experienced. I sat up on the edge of my bed, threw my covers off, breathing heavily and rapidly. It occurred to me that my heavy breathing was not from lack of oxygen, but an effort to cool off, much as dogs, lacking sweat glands, pant to cool down. With that in mind I began breathing deeply and rapidly. My initial panic went away, and I gradually cooled down. I eventually flipped my covers head to toe and went to sleep on the other end of the bed. Two nights later the same thing happened. I don't recall any particularly nasty symptoms ongoing, other than the usual sneezing and lung congestion that I had been suffering from since contracting a nasty strain of the flu in the fall of 2018. Here is where the story gets interesting and ties into this article. I flew back to the US in the fall of 2018 for a family reunion, and presumably picked up the flu along the way, which I gave to my brother-in-law 2-3 days later. We had spent the day driving around looking at the sights. He was driving, I was in the front seat, and my sister was in back. She didn't catch it. I was sneezing the whole day. I went to bed with a bowl to receive the shit from my lungs I was constantly coughing up. I spent the next few mornings sitting in the yard coughing up shit from my lungs, and sneezing profusely. I gradually got "better", and after a month or so declared myself "over it", only to find, after a week or so of "comfort", that the disease had moved on, like to my stomach for a month or so, and then to my lower digestive tract. I even had a recurrence of the shingles, which I had had some 30 years previously. Just one thing after another for like a year and a half until I got the Covid, or whatever. I now feel better than I have for a long time. (Continual knocking on wood. Bragging about your good fortune is terrible bad luck.) My reasoning is that those nights of raging fever killed off many of Covid's virus competitors, as this article seems to reflect. Irony of ironies if this disease we shut the world down for ends up being a good thing. Personally, I can't complain about getting the Covid. Knock wood.
Thanks for comment. Hope-Simpson’s theory about influenza transmission, is that it persists in the off-season through a small number of carriers. These people carry flu, without symptoms, through the summer. It’s highly plausible these crucial carriers are also for whatever reason uniquely susceptible to Corona infection and that, as you write, the immune response, particularly the fever, destroys the influenza they’re carrying.
i also had Corona. for me it was four days of the highest fever I’ve ever had, hallucinations and so forth. then it subsided as quickly as it came on.
Great piece, thankyou. I had understood the disappearance of flu to be a lack of testing for it but you explain it all so well. Your last line is crucial. Even if we eradicated CoV, something would simply replace it. I wonder if there is a sense in which we need it to happen, immunologically. I've not read Hope-Simpson in the original but this review in BioMed Cenral Virology Journal on The Epidemiology Of Influenza was a great read. Flu is still a surprisingly mysterious phenomenon in many ways and I am convinced we are over-reading the (real) infective dimension against some complementary even intrinsic functional dependency in our immune system. Much to discover. The important relationship with VitD is also covered in the article. Worth checking out the early C20th methods for transmission research if nothing else.
Reporting a similar experience in 2019. I got mildly sick for about a week, then had 2-3 months of respiratory issues. Productive coughs (to the point I had to keep a cup with a paper towel in it at my desk to spit my lung gunk into), popping on deep exhales (fluid in the lungs, particularly in morning), and sporadic shortness of breath. I have intermittent asthma, so I have an inhaler I tested on these symptoms with no results (so it wasn't asthma related, and I never had an asthma attack during this time).
After months of this, it just went away. The following year was 2020 obviously, and I went about my business (work, church, etc) as normal. I don't think I ever got C19, as I never had those particular symptoms (severe shortness of breath, loss of sense of smell), it's possible I had it mild, but I only tested once. If anything, I've been sick less since then.
I had heard that the 1918 Spanish Flu was as lethal to the young as it was because a very similar flu had swept through in the 1890s, leaving the survivors with meaningful immunity ~25 years later when the Spanish Flu came around. Those under about 30 were defenseless and culled in large numbers.
I've not researched this claim in any depth (and I'm not a specialist). Have you run across this claim before? If so, any thoughts?
Yes, this claim is often made on the theory that the 1889-92 pandemic, with three waves spread over three years, was another pandemic influenza event on the order of 1918, and conferred immunity to older people. Sure it's possible, but we don't know what virus caused the 1889-92 pandemic. Furthermore, the idea of prior immunity doesn't fully explain the mortality patterns observed in 1918.
What we'd expect from influenza, is elevated mortality in youngs (say, under 5) and olds (over 65). What Taubenberger calls a U-curve, with high mortality at both ends, and low mortality in the middle.
What we get in 1918 instead is a W: Elevated but mostly normal influenza mortality in youngs, somewhat depressed but still substantial influenza mortality in olds, but then a spike for those in their 20s and 30s.
Whatever's going on here, prior immunity to a hypothetical influenza A pandemic from the 1890s can't be the complete explanation.
Isn't Rand Paul saying there are ppl alive today that still have immunity to the Spanish Flu, Tcell memory/antibodies? This is really interesting stuff
eugyppius, have you seen this info? If you have the time to read the link, I'd appreciate your response -- thanks.
An excerpt:
"When the United States declared war in April 1917, the fledgling Pharmaceutical industry had something they had never had before – a large supply of human test subjects in the form of the US military’s first draft.
Pre-war in 1917, the US Army was 286,000 men. Post-war in 1920, the US army disbanded, and had 296,000 men.
During the war years 1918-19, the US Army ballooned to 6,000,000 men, with 2,000,000 men being sent overseas. The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research took advantage of this new pool of human guinea pigs to conduct vaccine experiments.
A REPORT ON ANTIMENINGITIS VACCINATION AND OBSERVATIONS ON AGGLUTININS IN THE BLOOD OF CHRONIC MENINGOCOCCUS CARRIERS
by Frederick L. Gates
From the Base Hospital, Fort Riley, Kansas, and The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, New York.
Received 1918 Jul 20
(Author note: Please read the Fort Riley paper in its entirety so you can appreciate the carelessness of the experiments conducted on these troops.)
Between January 21st and June 4th of 1918, Dr. Gates reports on an experiment where soldiers were given 3 doses of a bacterial meningitis vaccine. Those conducting the experiment on the soldiers were just spitballing dosages of a vaccine serum made in horses.
The vaccination regime was designed to be 3 doses. 4,792 men received the first dose, but only 4,257 got the 2nd dose (down 11%), and only 3702 received all three doses (down 22.7%).
A total of 1,090 men were not there for the 3rd dose. What happened to these soldiers? Were they shipped East by train from Kansas to board a ship to Europe? Were they in the Fort Riley hospital? Dr. Gates’ report doesn’t tell us."
I saw this W explained. Apparently the 20-30yr olds had been exposed to exactly the wrong type of flu as children.
When the 1918 flu hit it was able to bypass their defences because of the H & N combination, and cause great cell damage to what is normally the highest surviving group.
Yes. H3N8 flu in 1889 pandemic "primed" children growing in that time to know nothing about 1918 H1N1, and was a proximal cause of widespread 1918 susceptibility in the 20-29 year old cohort who died in numbers exceeding the typically vulnerable 80+ year olds. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48Klc3DPdtk&t=804s for more details. Good idea to rip this video. TPTB will be coming for it now, you will understand if you watch through the Q&A.
I'm not a doctor, indeed I have no medical knowledge. I do read, and I understand that the young people of 1918 died BECAUSE they had typical very energetic immune systems. The inflammation of their own body helped to kill them.
It seems typical of the cycotine 'storms' that are known now.
Since the publishing of this article, the flu came back to India which reached herd immunity against covid at ~70% infected (latest national seroprevalence study). I believe it is one of the first countries to have a significant flu outbreak since covid. This is strong evidence for viral interference.
"Destroying Corona would almost certainly mean bringing back influenza A, after much of our immunity has faded."
Good. We (you) have a prediction. Depending on how the trajectories of the viruses evolve, we may get a little more insight into the complex population dynamics you have identified.
Well, influenza has typically been the biggest seasonal driver of respiratory virus mortality. The number of detected infections varies enormously year-to-year. If influenza A can't develop good mutations / reassortments to escape immunity from last year's infection, it won't do that well.
"spanish flu" you write "the extreme pathogenicity of the influenza, with a case fatality rate of nearly 2.5%". CFR, IFR, are you very careful to always distinguish these things? Do you have a comment on the way in which these metrics were estimated as independent measures in Q1-Q2 2020 but subsequently both seem to have been conflated into an (overestimated) "CFR"?
2.5% CFR is a conventional number given in many textbooks. I don’t think the matter is very important, as my only point here is that the Spanish Flu was much deadlier than Corona, probably 10x more deadly, and also much more dangerous to young people.
That said: I suspect the 2,5% figure is based on calculations made by hospitals somewhere in the developed world, and so is likely a true ‘case fatality rate’ rather than an ‘infection fatality rate’.
We don’t have good records for worldwide mortality, and earlier work seems likely to overestimate worldwide deaths; recent suggestions of about 17-18 million spanish flu deaths worldwide are more credible, suggesting a population fatality rate of just under 1%. So the true infection fatality rate would be higher than 1%, but perhaps lower than 2.5%.
But yes of course, particularly the press and politicians have tended to imply that case fatality rates derived from official case numbers and mortality figures represent the true infection fatality rate of Corona, which is an obvious lie, as official case numbers reflect only a minority of actual infections.
Thank you for this provocative, well-informed, well-reasoned theory. I'm not sure why so many readers are insisting on their own pet theories as proof that your theory is wrong. It seems clear to me that the work of science in these circumstances it to continue testing ideas agains data, and selecting for ideas that do a better job of fitting more of the data. Your stack is a lucid model of how to do this, in addition to being very helpul and illuminating.
Absolutely fascinating. I’ve marveled at the collapse of the numbers and wondered what was going on, tending to think that a lot of flu was simply being diagnosed as Covid. I really appreciate this perspective.
Patrick, Dr. Zelenko thinks that we might have cures for the “flu” with HCQS and Ivermectin…..you know, the “horse dewormer.” Har. What amazes me is how easily people overlook some basics: we’ve known for months the recovery rates for Covid are 99.98 for the world and effective treatments used early on could have and did save many in the 70+ age groups. They also work for those younger, but with co-morbidities. Since when do we run from an enemy and expect that to defeat him? It’s as if the world was created yesterday and people are hysterically looking for direction in this “novel” universe.
I’m not sure I buy that Corona has replaced the flu. I think the testing merged the two and recoding perpetuated the confusion. I will keep paying attention to doctors and virologists on this, but simple observation and experience still enlighten. God bless.
I'm not sure what I just read but the simplest answer is usually the correct one.. The Flu has just been renamed the Covid. There is currently no accurate way to test for Covid. The PCR tests are picking up flu or common cold fragments at 40 cycles& returning false positives. Over 20 cycles the PCRs are useless& totally inaccurate. Its why the CDC recently started discouraging their use. We will never know the true scope of this fraud, but its massive. Lolz seriously, the wild Covaides is eating influenza?
PCR tests for Corona won’t light up on influenza, ever. They amplify a different RNA sequence that influenza viruses don’t have. The tests are flawed mainly in that they’re too sensitive and throw up positives, even when the person in question has recovered from Corona weeks or even months ago.
That said, there is a limited scope for confusion: If a patient has some Corona RNA in his mucous from an old infection, *and* he gets the flu, it’s easy to see how he’d test positive for Corona and be misdiagnosed. Maybe that even happens in some cases, but it’s not common. If influenza were still around in any quantity, doctors would be diagnosing it, and they’re just not, except in very low numbers.
The 1890 "Russian flu" is discussed below. There is strong evidence from a study in 2006 at KU Leuven that linked the OC43 coronavirus as having possibly jumped from a bovine source in this year. and was the actual cause of the outbreak. Today OC43 is one of the 4 common coronas that yields the common cold. So this ties into the theory that coronaviruses dominated prior to 1918. https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1751-7915.13889
In 2003 there was an outbreak in a Vancouver nursing home and authorities feared it was SARS, but testing showed that it was OC43. In the end it killed 8% of the residents, which I don't think would have been very different from SARS-COV2. The prof at Stanford with the Greek name referred to this event in early 2020 when he was trying to dissuade authorities from the lockdown frenzy. I haven't heard anything from him in 2021. Ioannidis is the name.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on what I've observed locally. Here in Texas, the 2019-2020 season (ends 9/30) yielded 51,948 positive cases of influenza in hospital laboratories. That is 20K higher than the previous two seasons (18-19 had 31,296 and 17-18 had 35,339). Of interest to me is whether or not hospitals reported these patients as Corona cases and/or deaths due to the incentive structure in place. Hospitals were given full government reimbursements for Corona patients, but nothing for Influenza. I cannot imagine that the integrity of most hospital administrators would've overrode their desire to keep the hospital funded during a time where elective procedures were paused or reduced.
Very interesting. I am writing from Germany, where there was also virtually no flu. This was reported by the media together with the explanation that the Corona measures (lock-down, social distancing etc.) were responsible for this. However, this argument seemed too simple to me.
That is why I looked into the facts of the matter.
Surveillance of acute respiratory diseases is performed in Germany by a network of sentinel physicians. In virological surveillance, physician visits due to acute respiratory diseases (with symptoms) are evaluated by taking throat swabs and sending them to the German National Reference Center (NRC) for evaluation.
Samples are tested for various respiratory viruses (influenza, rhinovirus, parainfluenza, human coronavirus, and others). Publication is in weekly reports in pdf format.
This surveillance takes place under the umbrella of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the German counterpart to the CDC and the government’s central scientific institution in the field of biomedicine.
They found a shortened flu season was observed in the spring of 2020, and no influenza virus was detected in samples during the 2020/21 season. The official explanation of the scientific (!) institute RKI is: Corona measures!
I have questioned this oh so simple reasoning.
Therefore, I extracted the data back to the year 2017 with great effort from the influenza weekly reports (pdf format) and transferred into Excel.
In particular, appropriate conclusions can be drawn from the graphical visualization of the positive rate of various detected viruses.
• There was a strong flu wave in 2017/18 (in Germany).
• Influenza viruses usually circulate noticeably from about week 50 to week 20.
• Deviant is spring 2020, where no influenza viruses were detected as early as week 12, i. e. the influenza season was over before any corona measures were taken. So there is no causality.
• Particularly deviant is the 2020/21 season, in which no influenza viruses were detected in the NRC.
• SARS Cov-2 viruses circulate at approximately the same time interval in 2020/21 instead of influenza viruses (however, at moderate positive rate, lower by a factor of 3-4 compared with the positive rate of influenza viruses usually present)
• In addition to SARS Cov-2, however, other respiratory viruses circulated with one exception: influenca viruses!
• After the end of the corona season in week 20 (2021) the positive rate of rhinoviruses increases again as usual after an influenza season. In contrast to 2020, however, the positive rate of parainfluenza viruses also increases.
The disappearance of influenza, obviously cannot be explained by the lock-down measures: it does not fit temporally in spring 2020 and it should also affect all viruses (SARS-Cov-2 and human coronaviruses, Rhinovirus) due to the identical transmission routes, but this is not the case.
Quite obviously, then, influenza viruses have been displaced by SARS-Cov-2 viruses.
The interesting question is how long this displacement will last and whether it will affect all influenza types, as observed in 2021.
I have great respect for your thoughtful analysis and particularly this article.
I am providing a link to a 2014 YouTube video (https://youtu.be/48Klc3DPdtk) of a presentation by Michael Worobey, Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, The University of Arizona, that you may find useful/interesting (it's also somewhat entertaining for science-y stuff).
His theory: Horses not birds may have been the reservoir for Influenza A and ties it to The Great Epizootic of 1872 (time stamp ≈37:00 minutes), an epidemic in horses that started in Toronto.
This adds to the explanation of the seemingly desperate insistence that every human on the planet get on the COVID “vax” and booster bandwagon: big pharma makes a *ton* of money on yearly flu shots. That revenue needs to be replaced.
Interesting article which gives me the excuse to share my personal Covid(?) history. I live in a small Guatemalan town that was, pre-Covid, establishing itself as a Central American stop on the musical events tourist trail. In March of 2020 an event was staged which brought some 300 paid ticket holders to town for a three day event. I believe they were mostly Europeans. In this time period I exhibited the following symptoms: I awoke one night struggling for breath. My bed was sweat soaked. I had a raging fever, far exceeding any of the "night sweats" I had previously experienced. I sat up on the edge of my bed, threw my covers off, breathing heavily and rapidly. It occurred to me that my heavy breathing was not from lack of oxygen, but an effort to cool off, much as dogs, lacking sweat glands, pant to cool down. With that in mind I began breathing deeply and rapidly. My initial panic went away, and I gradually cooled down. I eventually flipped my covers head to toe and went to sleep on the other end of the bed. Two nights later the same thing happened. I don't recall any particularly nasty symptoms ongoing, other than the usual sneezing and lung congestion that I had been suffering from since contracting a nasty strain of the flu in the fall of 2018. Here is where the story gets interesting and ties into this article. I flew back to the US in the fall of 2018 for a family reunion, and presumably picked up the flu along the way, which I gave to my brother-in-law 2-3 days later. We had spent the day driving around looking at the sights. He was driving, I was in the front seat, and my sister was in back. She didn't catch it. I was sneezing the whole day. I went to bed with a bowl to receive the shit from my lungs I was constantly coughing up. I spent the next few mornings sitting in the yard coughing up shit from my lungs, and sneezing profusely. I gradually got "better", and after a month or so declared myself "over it", only to find, after a week or so of "comfort", that the disease had moved on, like to my stomach for a month or so, and then to my lower digestive tract. I even had a recurrence of the shingles, which I had had some 30 years previously. Just one thing after another for like a year and a half until I got the Covid, or whatever. I now feel better than I have for a long time. (Continual knocking on wood. Bragging about your good fortune is terrible bad luck.) My reasoning is that those nights of raging fever killed off many of Covid's virus competitors, as this article seems to reflect. Irony of ironies if this disease we shut the world down for ends up being a good thing. Personally, I can't complain about getting the Covid. Knock wood.
Thanks for comment. Hope-Simpson’s theory about influenza transmission, is that it persists in the off-season through a small number of carriers. These people carry flu, without symptoms, through the summer. It’s highly plausible these crucial carriers are also for whatever reason uniquely susceptible to Corona infection and that, as you write, the immune response, particularly the fever, destroys the influenza they’re carrying.
i also had Corona. for me it was four days of the highest fever I’ve ever had, hallucinations and so forth. then it subsided as quickly as it came on.
Hopefully we can learn to live with this as we have with the flu, and soon. Hopefully the jab does more good than harm.
The jab will never do more good than harm.
Great piece, thankyou. I had understood the disappearance of flu to be a lack of testing for it but you explain it all so well. Your last line is crucial. Even if we eradicated CoV, something would simply replace it. I wonder if there is a sense in which we need it to happen, immunologically. I've not read Hope-Simpson in the original but this review in BioMed Cenral Virology Journal on The Epidemiology Of Influenza was a great read. Flu is still a surprisingly mysterious phenomenon in many ways and I am convinced we are over-reading the (real) infective dimension against some complementary even intrinsic functional dependency in our immune system. Much to discover. The important relationship with VitD is also covered in the article. Worth checking out the early C20th methods for transmission research if nothing else.
https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1743-422X-5-29
Very interesting!
Reporting a similar experience in 2019. I got mildly sick for about a week, then had 2-3 months of respiratory issues. Productive coughs (to the point I had to keep a cup with a paper towel in it at my desk to spit my lung gunk into), popping on deep exhales (fluid in the lungs, particularly in morning), and sporadic shortness of breath. I have intermittent asthma, so I have an inhaler I tested on these symptoms with no results (so it wasn't asthma related, and I never had an asthma attack during this time).
After months of this, it just went away. The following year was 2020 obviously, and I went about my business (work, church, etc) as normal. I don't think I ever got C19, as I never had those particular symptoms (severe shortness of breath, loss of sense of smell), it's possible I had it mild, but I only tested once. If anything, I've been sick less since then.
I had heard that the 1918 Spanish Flu was as lethal to the young as it was because a very similar flu had swept through in the 1890s, leaving the survivors with meaningful immunity ~25 years later when the Spanish Flu came around. Those under about 30 were defenseless and culled in large numbers.
I've not researched this claim in any depth (and I'm not a specialist). Have you run across this claim before? If so, any thoughts?
Yes, this claim is often made on the theory that the 1889-92 pandemic, with three waves spread over three years, was another pandemic influenza event on the order of 1918, and conferred immunity to older people. Sure it's possible, but we don't know what virus caused the 1889-92 pandemic. Furthermore, the idea of prior immunity doesn't fully explain the mortality patterns observed in 1918.
What we'd expect from influenza, is elevated mortality in youngs (say, under 5) and olds (over 65). What Taubenberger calls a U-curve, with high mortality at both ends, and low mortality in the middle.
What we get in 1918 instead is a W: Elevated but mostly normal influenza mortality in youngs, somewhat depressed but still substantial influenza mortality in olds, but then a spike for those in their 20s and 30s.
Whatever's going on here, prior immunity to a hypothetical influenza A pandemic from the 1890s can't be the complete explanation.
Very helpful. Thank you.
Isn't Rand Paul saying there are ppl alive today that still have immunity to the Spanish Flu, Tcell memory/antibodies? This is really interesting stuff
eugyppius, have you seen this info? If you have the time to read the link, I'd appreciate your response -- thanks.
An excerpt:
"When the United States declared war in April 1917, the fledgling Pharmaceutical industry had something they had never had before – a large supply of human test subjects in the form of the US military’s first draft.
Pre-war in 1917, the US Army was 286,000 men. Post-war in 1920, the US army disbanded, and had 296,000 men.
During the war years 1918-19, the US Army ballooned to 6,000,000 men, with 2,000,000 men being sent overseas. The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research took advantage of this new pool of human guinea pigs to conduct vaccine experiments.
A REPORT ON ANTIMENINGITIS VACCINATION AND OBSERVATIONS ON AGGLUTININS IN THE BLOOD OF CHRONIC MENINGOCOCCUS CARRIERS
by Frederick L. Gates
From the Base Hospital, Fort Riley, Kansas, and The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, New York.
Received 1918 Jul 20
(Author note: Please read the Fort Riley paper in its entirety so you can appreciate the carelessness of the experiments conducted on these troops.)
Between January 21st and June 4th of 1918, Dr. Gates reports on an experiment where soldiers were given 3 doses of a bacterial meningitis vaccine. Those conducting the experiment on the soldiers were just spitballing dosages of a vaccine serum made in horses.
The vaccination regime was designed to be 3 doses. 4,792 men received the first dose, but only 4,257 got the 2nd dose (down 11%), and only 3702 received all three doses (down 22.7%).
A total of 1,090 men were not there for the 3rd dose. What happened to these soldiers? Were they shipped East by train from Kansas to board a ship to Europe? Were they in the Fort Riley hospital? Dr. Gates’ report doesn’t tell us."
from this link: https://vaccineimpact.com/2018/did-military-experimental-vaccine-in-1918-kill-50-100-million-people-blamed-as-spanish-flu/
I saw this W explained. Apparently the 20-30yr olds had been exposed to exactly the wrong type of flu as children.
When the 1918 flu hit it was able to bypass their defences because of the H & N combination, and cause great cell damage to what is normally the highest surviving group.
Yes. H3N8 flu in 1889 pandemic "primed" children growing in that time to know nothing about 1918 H1N1, and was a proximal cause of widespread 1918 susceptibility in the 20-29 year old cohort who died in numbers exceeding the typically vulnerable 80+ year olds. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48Klc3DPdtk&t=804s for more details. Good idea to rip this video. TPTB will be coming for it now, you will understand if you watch through the Q&A.
I'm not a doctor, indeed I have no medical knowledge. I do read, and I understand that the young people of 1918 died BECAUSE they had typical very energetic immune systems. The inflammation of their own body helped to kill them.
It seems typical of the cycotine 'storms' that are known now.
Since the publishing of this article, the flu came back to India which reached herd immunity against covid at ~70% infected (latest national seroprevalence study). I believe it is one of the first countries to have a significant flu outbreak since covid. This is strong evidence for viral interference.
"Destroying Corona would almost certainly mean bringing back influenza A, after much of our immunity has faded."
Good. We (you) have a prediction. Depending on how the trajectories of the viruses evolve, we may get a little more insight into the complex population dynamics you have identified.
If I understood you correctly there is a dominant respiratory illness every season, with one illness rising in tandem with the fall of another.
What about the number of infections? Do they also stay more or less the same?
Well, influenza has typically been the biggest seasonal driver of respiratory virus mortality. The number of detected infections varies enormously year-to-year. If influenza A can't develop good mutations / reassortments to escape immunity from last year's infection, it won't do that well.
"spanish flu" you write "the extreme pathogenicity of the influenza, with a case fatality rate of nearly 2.5%". CFR, IFR, are you very careful to always distinguish these things? Do you have a comment on the way in which these metrics were estimated as independent measures in Q1-Q2 2020 but subsequently both seem to have been conflated into an (overestimated) "CFR"?
Thanks for your work.
2.5% CFR is a conventional number given in many textbooks. I don’t think the matter is very important, as my only point here is that the Spanish Flu was much deadlier than Corona, probably 10x more deadly, and also much more dangerous to young people.
That said: I suspect the 2,5% figure is based on calculations made by hospitals somewhere in the developed world, and so is likely a true ‘case fatality rate’ rather than an ‘infection fatality rate’.
We don’t have good records for worldwide mortality, and earlier work seems likely to overestimate worldwide deaths; recent suggestions of about 17-18 million spanish flu deaths worldwide are more credible, suggesting a population fatality rate of just under 1%. So the true infection fatality rate would be higher than 1%, but perhaps lower than 2.5%.
But yes of course, particularly the press and politicians have tended to imply that case fatality rates derived from official case numbers and mortality figures represent the true infection fatality rate of Corona, which is an obvious lie, as official case numbers reflect only a minority of actual infections.
Thank you for this provocative, well-informed, well-reasoned theory. I'm not sure why so many readers are insisting on their own pet theories as proof that your theory is wrong. It seems clear to me that the work of science in these circumstances it to continue testing ideas agains data, and selecting for ideas that do a better job of fitting more of the data. Your stack is a lucid model of how to do this, in addition to being very helpul and illuminating.
Absolutely fascinating. I’ve marveled at the collapse of the numbers and wondered what was going on, tending to think that a lot of flu was simply being diagnosed as Covid. I really appreciate this perspective.
Patrick, Dr. Zelenko thinks that we might have cures for the “flu” with HCQS and Ivermectin…..you know, the “horse dewormer.” Har. What amazes me is how easily people overlook some basics: we’ve known for months the recovery rates for Covid are 99.98 for the world and effective treatments used early on could have and did save many in the 70+ age groups. They also work for those younger, but with co-morbidities. Since when do we run from an enemy and expect that to defeat him? It’s as if the world was created yesterday and people are hysterically looking for direction in this “novel” universe.
I’m not sure I buy that Corona has replaced the flu. I think the testing merged the two and recoding perpetuated the confusion. I will keep paying attention to doctors and virologists on this, but simple observation and experience still enlighten. God bless.
Quercetin with zinc, C and D3 also work.
I'm not sure what I just read but the simplest answer is usually the correct one.. The Flu has just been renamed the Covid. There is currently no accurate way to test for Covid. The PCR tests are picking up flu or common cold fragments at 40 cycles& returning false positives. Over 20 cycles the PCRs are useless& totally inaccurate. Its why the CDC recently started discouraging their use. We will never know the true scope of this fraud, but its massive. Lolz seriously, the wild Covaides is eating influenza?
no, this isn’t plausible.
If the testing method is badly flawed how could it not at least be plausible?
PCR tests for Corona won’t light up on influenza, ever. They amplify a different RNA sequence that influenza viruses don’t have. The tests are flawed mainly in that they’re too sensitive and throw up positives, even when the person in question has recovered from Corona weeks or even months ago.
That said, there is a limited scope for confusion: If a patient has some Corona RNA in his mucous from an old infection, *and* he gets the flu, it’s easy to see how he’d test positive for Corona and be misdiagnosed. Maybe that even happens in some cases, but it’s not common. If influenza were still around in any quantity, doctors would be diagnosing it, and they’re just not, except in very low numbers.
The 1890 "Russian flu" is discussed below. There is strong evidence from a study in 2006 at KU Leuven that linked the OC43 coronavirus as having possibly jumped from a bovine source in this year. and was the actual cause of the outbreak. Today OC43 is one of the 4 common coronas that yields the common cold. So this ties into the theory that coronaviruses dominated prior to 1918. https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1751-7915.13889
In 2003 there was an outbreak in a Vancouver nursing home and authorities feared it was SARS, but testing showed that it was OC43. In the end it killed 8% of the residents, which I don't think would have been very different from SARS-COV2. The prof at Stanford with the Greek name referred to this event in early 2020 when he was trying to dissuade authorities from the lockdown frenzy. I haven't heard anything from him in 2021. Ioannidis is the name.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on what I've observed locally. Here in Texas, the 2019-2020 season (ends 9/30) yielded 51,948 positive cases of influenza in hospital laboratories. That is 20K higher than the previous two seasons (18-19 had 31,296 and 17-18 had 35,339). Of interest to me is whether or not hospitals reported these patients as Corona cases and/or deaths due to the incentive structure in place. Hospitals were given full government reimbursements for Corona patients, but nothing for Influenza. I cannot imagine that the integrity of most hospital administrators would've overrode their desire to keep the hospital funded during a time where elective procedures were paused or reduced.
Very interesting. I am writing from Germany, where there was also virtually no flu. This was reported by the media together with the explanation that the Corona measures (lock-down, social distancing etc.) were responsible for this. However, this argument seemed too simple to me.
That is why I looked into the facts of the matter.
Surveillance of acute respiratory diseases is performed in Germany by a network of sentinel physicians. In virological surveillance, physician visits due to acute respiratory diseases (with symptoms) are evaluated by taking throat swabs and sending them to the German National Reference Center (NRC) for evaluation.
Samples are tested for various respiratory viruses (influenza, rhinovirus, parainfluenza, human coronavirus, and others). Publication is in weekly reports in pdf format.
This surveillance takes place under the umbrella of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the German counterpart to the CDC and the government’s central scientific institution in the field of biomedicine.
They found a shortened flu season was observed in the spring of 2020, and no influenza virus was detected in samples during the 2020/21 season. The official explanation of the scientific (!) institute RKI is: Corona measures!
I have questioned this oh so simple reasoning.
Therefore, I extracted the data back to the year 2017 with great effort from the influenza weekly reports (pdf format) and transferred into Excel.
In particular, appropriate conclusions can be drawn from the graphical visualization of the positive rate of various detected viruses.
• There was a strong flu wave in 2017/18 (in Germany).
• Influenza viruses usually circulate noticeably from about week 50 to week 20.
• Deviant is spring 2020, where no influenza viruses were detected as early as week 12, i. e. the influenza season was over before any corona measures were taken. So there is no causality.
• Particularly deviant is the 2020/21 season, in which no influenza viruses were detected in the NRC.
• SARS Cov-2 viruses circulate at approximately the same time interval in 2020/21 instead of influenza viruses (however, at moderate positive rate, lower by a factor of 3-4 compared with the positive rate of influenza viruses usually present)
• In addition to SARS Cov-2, however, other respiratory viruses circulated with one exception: influenca viruses!
• After the end of the corona season in week 20 (2021) the positive rate of rhinoviruses increases again as usual after an influenza season. In contrast to 2020, however, the positive rate of parainfluenza viruses also increases.
The disappearance of influenza, obviously cannot be explained by the lock-down measures: it does not fit temporally in spring 2020 and it should also affect all viruses (SARS-Cov-2 and human coronaviruses, Rhinovirus) due to the identical transmission routes, but this is not the case.
Quite obviously, then, influenza viruses have been displaced by SARS-Cov-2 viruses.
The interesting question is how long this displacement will last and whether it will affect all influenza types, as observed in 2021.
I have great respect for your thoughtful analysis and particularly this article.
I am providing a link to a 2014 YouTube video (https://youtu.be/48Klc3DPdtk) of a presentation by Michael Worobey, Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, The University of Arizona, that you may find useful/interesting (it's also somewhat entertaining for science-y stuff).
His theory: Horses not birds may have been the reservoir for Influenza A and ties it to The Great Epizootic of 1872 (time stamp ≈37:00 minutes), an epidemic in horses that started in Toronto.
This adds to the explanation of the seemingly desperate insistence that every human on the planet get on the COVID “vax” and booster bandwagon: big pharma makes a *ton* of money on yearly flu shots. That revenue needs to be replaced.
"The absence of flu must be ascribed to lockdowns, even though flu is gone even in countries that have not locked down".
Welp...
I would also note, we went from mass-vaccinating the flu to mass-vaccinating Corona. One disappeared and the other we can't get rid of.
Hmm..