Ask an infectious diseases expert about the upcoming flu season, and how it may affect, or be affected, by COVID-19, and the word you're likely to hear is "uncertain."For starters, flu is always unpredictable, they'll say.
Flu activity and severity largely depend on the strains of virus circulating, and how well the vaccine strains, which are selected in advance of each flu season, match up with the circulating strains."Sometimes we do well, and sometimes we don't do so well," Jeanne Marrazzo, MD, MPH, director of the division of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said recently during an Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA) briefing.The virulence of the circulating strains, transmission dynamics,