Dad's been a respiratory therapist for 23 years. Basically that means he deals with people on ventilators and watches people die all day. This is his 3rd pandemic. They literally aren't getting any flu patients this year. not one.
national rates, last i saw, influenza was down 97%.
Anyone else skeptical about that number? Starting to think the CDC or World Health, or idk maybe john mccain's ugly ghost release flu viruses to keep the population down. just not this year, they were doing too well with the coof so they'd thought they should spare us.
The one plausible explanation I've seen for this that isn't "covid hoax" goes something like this: The coof and the flu have similar transmission vectors, so when we take measures to suppress the coof (social distancing, working from home, whatever) it also suppresses the flu. But because the coof appears to be more transmissible than the flu, the flu is more heavily suppressed.
I don't know if that's enough to explain the near disappearance of the flu on its own - I think it's pretty likely that we're misdiagnosing at least some cases of the flu as covid-19 - but I do think it plays a large role.