I just think most people haven't actually had a bad case of the flu or a respiratory illness before. So people who did around November/December assume it must have been covid, when they most likely just caught something that people usually catch around that time of year.
I find that very hard to believe. Who can honestly say they were never wrecked by a bad flu and coughed up a lung for a week or two? Certainly I have been, and everybody in my family has been, and I've certainly seen friends and coworkers sick as hell before too. Most people know what it feels like to be very ill.
If anything, the fevers, coughs and congestion caused by covid 19 are fairly mild, even though covid is quite lethal. That's why you have people who are dying of covid but think they aren't very sick, or even think the virus isn't real at all.
Colds are pretty common, influenza not that much. In my 39 years of age I typically catch a cold almost every year, but the flu only once in my entire life.
I read once that many cases of the flu are really food poisoning. I got H1N1 and felt like I was dying for a week. Looking back I now think it's the only time I've ever really had the flu.
Influenza can be mild, even asymptomatic, so unless you are really able to test; you probably don't have good numbers for how often you've caught the flu.
Influenza is rare? Maybe rare for you if you habitually get the flu shot twice a year, but even then the efficacy of the flu shot can be as low as 50%. Influenza is very common, most people have experienced it.
There are a myriad of reasons why people think covid isn't real. But for the segment of that population who think it isn't real when they are dying of it, the perceived severity of their experienced symptoms is a big part of it.
It took 31 years before I ever caught the real flu (influenza), and not just a cold or stomach flu. And most people in my family or my friends have never had it.
Your friends and family might never have had serious influenza symptoms. But asymptomatic infections are very common so it's likely that some of them have at least been infected.
How do you tell the difference between a terrible cold and flu? Doctors can't tell the difference from symptoms alone, do you have yourself tested each time you have a cold?
might have gone extinct with the lockdowns
That's not likely, and with fewer people exposed to the flu and gaining natural immunity, there may even be a big spike in flu cases if social distancing and mask wearing are relaxed next flu season.
While you can’t perfectly reliably, a fever is a pretty good indicator; anything beyond a mild fever is very unusual for the cold, but standard for flu.
This is unlikely as humans aren’t the only hosts for influenza. Almost all can infect birds and most can infect pigs. Probably some other humans too. And jump between eachother and humans.
We might have the same issue with COVID: vaccinating all humans may not eradicate it if some animals serve as natural reservoirs (mink maybe? Ferrets?).
I guess that's a good point, but I think of the flu as different symptoms, you are really fatigued, you have brain fog, feel a bit like you are at the brink of death, have headaches, and you're caughing, maybe with a sore throat and more difficulty breathing.
Whereas colds are more congestion with drowsiness.
But you're totally right, symptoms alone are hard to use for accurately knowing what you had, there are so many types of cold virus and bacteria out there too.
I guess for me, I had never had the symptoms I describe in the former, until a few years ago I did, which I thought of as getting the flu. Had it been early 2020, I might have wondered if it was Covid, given the description of symptoms.
while high fever and other symptoms is a rule of thumb, there's still enough overlap between flu and cold symptoms (especially a mild flu vs a bad cold) that your doctor is not going to tell you you have one or the other without doing a flu test.
With Flu your bones or muscles ache or your belly feels like it falls off. When bad, you have all symptoms. Worse is when attracting lung inflammation, that feels as if you are constantly drowning. All of this with high fever or even worse, cold fever.
