I heard a comment that Australia had bypassed their usual Flu season, due the the Covid rules in place masks etc, a quick search revealed most of the southern hemisphere reported the same news.... Pity we are not all following the rules....
Health systems across the southern hemisphere were bracing a few months ago for their annual surge in influenza cases, which alongside Covid-19 could have overwhelmed hospitals. They never came.
Many countries in the southern half of the globe have instead experienced either record low levels of flu or none at all, public health specialists in Australia, New Zealand and South America have said, sparing potentially tens of thousands of lives and offering a glimmer of hope as winter approaches in the northern hemisphere.
General practitioners in New Zealand have not detected a single influenza case since they started screening patients in June, health data shows; last year about 57% of the samples they collected were positive.
The trend holds true across the Tasman Sea in Australia, where Covid-19 restrictions have also deeply dented rates of flu and other respiratory illnesses. The country recorded more than 131,000 influenza cases in the peak months of July and August last year, according to government data. Over the same period this year, there were 315.
“Cases have fallen off a cliff since March,” said Prof Ian Barr, deputy director of the World Health Organization’s collaborating centre for reference and research on influenza, in Melbourne.
Fewer than 40 Australians have died from influenza this year, compared to more than 950 last year, “and there haven’t been any deaths for the past three to four months”, Barr added.
Even across South America and in South Africa, where lockdowns have been patchy or harder to enforce, and Covid-19 has spread widely and killed tens of thousands of people, flu rates have been well below historical rates or nonexistent – despite increased testing for it in the Americas, according to the Pan American Health Organisation.
As an unprecedented live experiment on a massive population, it could offer some good news for northern hemisphere countries heading into their own flu season, just as drier air and more time indoors are expected to drive up Covid-19 rates. Even relatively less stringent quarantines appear to be surprisingly potent at suppressing influenza and other common respiratory illnesses.
Full story
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/sep/17/falling-flu-rates-in-southern-hemisphere-offers-hope-as-winter-approaches-coronavirusInteresting graphs ....
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/09/12/the-southern-hemisphere-skipped-flu-season-in-2020