Coronavirus
Why the Flu Activity is at Historic Lows During the Coronavirus Crisis
As the world focuses on COVID-19, influenza — that other contagious respiratory illness caused by a virus — seems to have all but disappeared.
Flu activity is “unusually low” for this time of year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in its latest weekly U.S. influenza surveillance report.
“The CDC is being modest — influenza is at record-setting lows,” Dr. William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, told TODAY.
“The flu virus is not circulating in our population the way it normally does.”
He and his colleagues have been conducting flu surveillance since the 1990s and have never seen illness levels close to this low, Schaffner noted.
