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Comment by worker767424 | Hacker News Reader

I didn't get the big push for flu shots this year. Between social distancing and masks, it's obviously going to spread a lot less, there some risk to going to a clinic to get the shot, and we normally use data from the southern hemisphere to predict which strains will be dominant this season, but with significantly reduced travel and social restrictions in the southern hemisphere, the data's going to be bad, so this year's flu shot won't be as effective.

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Earlier in the year I decided I was going to get a flu shot this year, for the first time ever. I was in the hospital for a non-Covid-related thing, and a nurse convinced me to do it for everyone else. Okay, sold.

And then around April it became evident to me that maybe it is fine to wait until next year.

Heh, I was sneezing a lot late last year, and put an entry into my calendar to get a flu jab in October 2020. (I've never gotten one before, but figured that maybe I've hit the age where my body doesn't bounce back as quickly anymore.)

Never got around to getting it.

The argument pushed here was that covid and flu combine badly. If you have both at the same time, it results in harder case of covid.

So you are supposed to get flu shot, so that if you get covid, you have better chance of it going easily.

The company I work for organized flu shots and you did not had to go to clinic. It was in work, people were spread out so you was in room alone when they shot you.

1. I do NOT want to get sick and wonder if I have COVID-19.

2. The medical establishment does NOT want a bunch of flu cases flooding into already-overwhelmed hospitals.

3. Is there a possibility of interaction between COVID-19 and the flu? I have no idea, I just made this up.

so yeah, I think the risk of the flu is a lot lower, and the vaccine might be less effective, and there are risks to getting vaccinated, but presumably the various risks of the flu during a pandemic are worse than the risks of the flu during normal times.

I think the biggest flu shot proponents have been given a much greater voice with covid and would not want to back down from it now.

> with significantly reduced travel and social restrictions in the southern hemisphere, the data's going to be bad, so this year's flu shot won't be as effective

This does not seem correct. The data on this does not require travel or social interaction. The CDC (and other gov't agencies throughout the world) literally has cooperation with sites around the world to monitor the rise of new flu strains. These sites use technology like: the telephone, the internet, and the fax machine, to transmit the information the world uses to develop the current generation flu vaccine.

What I meant is that if people aren't traveling, strains will be more localized, so what happened in Australia last summer tells us little about our winter.

It is an hypothesis, but the data suggests that the effect will be weak to non-existence. Data shows that the seasonal influenza pattern existed before modern era levels of international travel.

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