Australians wiped out the flu and avoided 50,000 other cases of sickness and disease

Lessons from Coronavirus

Lockdowns and border closures mean many diseases have been prevented

It’s peak season for flu here in Australia and there’s almost no sign of it.  As Chris Gillham wrote here back in May, we know lockdowns stop viruses, because flu cases are 85% down.  Now he shows that this extends to other diseases too, and Chris has used data from the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System to calculate that just shy of 200,000 fewer Australians contracted any of the notifiable diseases in the first seven months of 2020 compared to the first seven months of 2019.

Is some of that disease burden just the price of holiday-makers bringing back diseases from overseas each year?

No one wants to stop the planes returning to the skies, but it begs the question — do we have to accept the onslaught of winter germs every year?

The answer may lie with other things we’ve discovered in the Covid pandemic too — that sick people should stay home from work and school, and that we have a lot of anti-viral tools we can use. Perhaps it’s time that travellers considered taking preemptive anti-virals, which might improve their holidays and also reduce the disease burden back at home.

The huge suppression of influenza and other non-COVID diseases also adds a new perspective to the pandemic sick leave funding in Victoria that compensates low-income earners in particular who have run out of annual sick days and are showing up to work despite feeling ill because they fear for their jobs and their earnings. Should such funding always be available nationally to counter the possible long-term suppression of not only COVID-19 but all communicable diseases, some potentially deadly, with resultant public health cost savings?

A reduction in so many diseases is surely a productivity boon to both employers and the population at large.
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Notably the reduction includes other diseases like syphilis and salmonella which are not respiratory diseases (see the graph below).

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Here’s the last four months of influenza from a global perspective — almost 97% down and this is across ten countries, not just Australia, with their most recent updates to the WHO FluNet:

 

 

Near the peak of the flu seasons in the southern hemisphere, the WHO chart below shows all subtypes of influenza have all but disappeared. The 2019 Flu season was a bumper year in Australia, far above the norm. But there has never been a flu season like this one.

Here’s all the data on all the notifiable diseases.

WHO, Graph, Influenza Week 31, 2020.

Fewer infections could mean lower immunity, but antivirals and biotech can make up for that

We stand on the cusp of a biotech revolution. Like the point computers were at 40 years ago, and medicine was post- WWII with antibiotics and mass vaccines. We have the code for living things. We can do mass arrays, mass testing. People can sequencing their genes “for fun” for a couple of hundred dollars to find ancestors, and risky nucleotides. We are starting to customize and personalize treatment like never before. (What’s your APOE risk?)

UPDATE: To get a taste of the speed of the biotech revolution ponder that in 1990 the Human Genome Project was projected to cost $3 billion and take 15 years, instead it came in faster than expected and far under budget. Today you can get your whole genome sequenced in full for $1,000 and more than a million people have already done it.

• Last year HIV was eliminated from the genome of a living animal. The virus inserts itself into the DNA of thousands of cells but researchers found them and edited it out.
• Researchers Used Gene Editing With CRISPR to Treat Lethal Lung Diseases Before Birth
• Diabetes was reversed in mice with genetically edited stem cells derived from patients
• New CRISPR base-editing technology slows ALS progression in mice
  etc etc etc

Reducing the scourge of disease potentially puts us at a higher risk from novel viruses, but that can be more than offset through the rapidly growing supply of antivirals, CRISPR, monoclonal antibodies, stem cells, RNAi, and new RNA and Recombinant vector vaccines. (Why have antivirals been so ignored for so many years?)

In any case, the threat of newer and darker bioweapons makes the need to beat viruses more urgent than ever. Catching more strains of the flu isn’t going to save us from a Nipah virus or hemorrhagic fever.

We already have major policy programs that reduce infections but increase the future disease risk

Vaccines, so far, can’t elicit the same long term protection that viruses do.  Natural influenza infections produce life long immunity to that particular strain of influenza and partial immunity to related strains, but at the price of some deaths, and much morbidity. Vaccines try to mimic the viruses, but protection is often short lived.

So influenza vaccines improve short term immunity but they also leave people exposed to worse cases of influenza in future years, as was found with Swine flu and possibly also temporarily at an increased risk of common cold.

The US CDC admits that vaccination only reduces the risk of flu by 40 – 60% and that’s in good years where the flu strains are not new. There’s plenty of scope to use the Covid pandemic to rethink and improve the way we deal with infectious disease.

Perhaps just using masks when sick, staying home, having antivirals ready and Over-the-counter, along with better handwashing and hygiene will become normal business and social ettiquette and we can spend more of our lives being healthy.

Chris Gillham, who did the graphs is a part of the unofficial BOM audit team here normally crunching data on temperatures and rainfall.