this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
73 points (97.4% liked)
Science
13318 readers
16 users here now
Subscribe to see new publications and popular science coverage of current research on your homepage
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Just speculating but I think the social distancing and mask wearing during covid is what made that strain of influenza go extinct.
Oh for sure ... by "lockdown" I'm referring to the general suite of civil measures including masks etc ... basically anything other than a vaccine or preventative medicine.
And of course, an additional dimension here is that influenza is no slouch of a virus .... eradicating the flu would be significant for public health. So to my mind, kinda accidentally eradicating a strain of it should be a big "huh ... how did we do that again?" rather than just "now we need to adjust our vaccines".
Thanks for posting this. Most I read about these days is how it has never made any dent scientifically but maybe I‘m getting sucked into propaganda there.
What has never made a dent scientifically? The lockdowns during the pandemic? I mean that’s demonstrably false … fewer people got the virus without without the protection of a vaccine because of them. And some places managed to eradicate the virus with them, which saddens me because if we’d managed to limit infections and the amount of mutations and variants until vaccines came through, we could be in a different world now. Like, COVID could be extinct and no one talks about it.
I‘m actually not even sure where I heard this. Good that you mention it now. I‘ll be on the lookout. This is why it’s important to talk about stuff every now and then.