Fears of a 'perfect storm' as flu season nears - CIDRAP

"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 big concern this year, of course, is that we are going to see what could be a perfect storm of accelerated COVID-19 activity as people gather more inside, in particular, as they become continually fatigued with the mask wearing, the social distancing, and the hand hygiene, and as they are exposed to seasonal influenza," Marrazzo said.

It's a scenario that Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy Director Michael Osterholm, PhD, MPH, and Ed Belongia, MD, director of the Center for Clinical Epidemiology and Population Health at the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute, wrote about earlier this year in an editorial for Science.

"One can only imagine that a fair amount of that reduction has to do with what we're doing to mitigate transmission risk with COVID-19," Leonard Mermel, DO, ScM, a professor of medicine at Brown University, said during the IDSA briefing.

"If you're masking, you're staying at home, you're avoiding large crowds, you're not going to work when you're sick, some of the things that are happening with COVID-19 are going to tamp down transmission risk from influenza.".

"I think we're going to be needing to test somebody for both COVID and influenza, if they are presenting to healthcare with influenza-like-illness, which of course complicates things in that there's already supply-chain issues related to testing for COVID," Tosh said.

"My concern is that the system could become rapidly overwhelmed, and individual clinicians are going to be faced with a lot of challenges trying to figure out how to get both of those tests done in a timely fashion," Marrazzo said.

"We certainly need to have the stockpile of reagents and kits so people on the frontlines can differentiate those two viruses, treat those that need to be treated for influenza, and also alert our public health officials if it's COVID-19, in terms of quarantine and contact tracing.

Regardless of how well this year's flu shot matches up with the circulating strains, public health officials and infectious disease experts say flu vaccination this year is going to be extremely important.

"The flu vaccine does work: it prevents hospitalizations, it prevents mortality, it prevents symptomatic illness," Marrazzo said.

"It's important to get it [the flu vaccine] every year, but the importance of getting it this year can't be stressed [enough]," said Tosh.