What happened to “flu season?” In the age of COVID, “the flu” has been reclassified as coronavirus, says epidemiologist
A few months ago, some infectious disease experts began warning that it would extremely difficult, as the COVID-19 pandemic lingered into the fall, for frontline healthcare providers to determine if sickness was due to the novel coronavirus or good, old-fashioned influenza.
The reason, they said, is that in many respects, flu symptoms could and would mimic COVID-19 symptoms.
But according to one epidemiologist, that problem has been solved by the ‘powers that be’: Simply reclassify flu cases as COVID-19 illnesses — that way, “flu cases” will go down this year while Joe Biden’s authoritarian Democrats get to continue ‘justifying’ perpetual lockdowns and theft of our liberty and freedom.
Rates of influenza have remained persistently low through late 2020 and into 2021, cratering from levels a year ago and raising the puzzling specter of sharply reduced influenza transmission rates even as positive tests for COVID-19 have shattered numerous records over the last several weeks.
Where have all the flu cases gone?
Epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski thinks he can answer the riddle.
“Influenza has been renamed COVID in large part,” Wittkowski, the former head of biostatistics, epidemiology and research design at Rockefeller University, told the outlet.
“There may be quite a number of influenza cases included in the ‘presumed COVID’ category of people who have COVID symptoms (which Influenza symptoms can be mistaken for), but are not tested for SARS RNA,” he added.
Such patients, he explained, “also may have some SARS RNA sitting in their nose while being infected with Influenza, in which case the influenza would be ‘confirmed’ to be COVID.”
You know, like when you die from a gunshot wound or a car accident but just happen to test positive for the novel coronavirus, it’s listed as a COVID death.
But don’t just take our word for it or that of Wittkowski; the government’s own data shows that something fishy is going on, which has been par for the course when it comes to misrepresenting the threat of this virus.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recent weekly influenza surveillance tracker, cumulative positive flu rates from late September to mid-December only stands at 0.2 percent, according to clinical labs that test for the virus. That compares to last year’s very typical 8.7 percent cumulative.
Weekly comparisons of data from last year and this year show an even starker difference: A year ago this week, the positive flu rate was 22 percent, but this year it’s just 0.1 percent.
Some have attempted to explain the humongous difference in flu infections by claiming that mask-wearing, social distancing, and even lockdowns are making the difference.
Timothy Sly, an epidemiology professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, told the outlet that “the reduced incidence of seasonal influenza is almost certainly due to the protection that a large proportion of the population has been using for many months.” Those measures, he said, are “designed to be effective against any airborne respiratory virus.”
And Holden Maecker, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University, agreed. “I feel pretty confident that the COVID-19 mitigation measures have caused the reduction in flu cases this year,” he told Just the News. “Masks, social distancing, and hand washing are all effective counter-measures against colds and flu.”
Really?
That’s just BS; if that were true, then COVID cases wouldn’t be spiking at all, anywhere — especially in liberty-free zones like New York and California.
But Maecker had an explanation for that, too. Asked why COVID continues to spread but the highly contagious influenza bug isn’t, he said: “I think it’s because (1) there is less pre-existing immunity to SARS-CoV-2 in the population, whereas most of us have had vaccines and/or previous bouts with flu; and (2) the SARS-CoV-2 virus seems to spread more easily than influenza, including more aerosol transmission and ‘super-spreader’ events. Flu transmission is almost entirely close-range droplets and hand-to-nose or eyes contact.”
Again…BS. We’re being lied to once again about COVID so the authoritarians in our society can continue justifying the elimination of our freedoms.
- Source : JD Heyes
