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Comment by wolfram74 | Hacker News Reader

My generous interpretation of OP is that during the covid pandemic our precautions that kinda-sorta slowed down covid were adequate to basically remove influenza from the human population as indicated by being the least amount of influenza activity on record[0]

[0]https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm

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It's not widely agreed upon that this was due to mitigations, and there's unfortunately no evidence they slowed down COVID either. All claims that mitigations slowed COVID fall apart when examined carefully (often they aren't even real, they're just model predictions being presented as if that was the same thing as empirical evidence).

Rather, there seems to be some mechanism by which some viruses push out others. This can also be seen in how new SARS-CoV-2 variants would often rapidly exterminate the prior variant within weeks, instead of co-existing.

That doesn't make sense. If that were the case then the cold & flu wouldn't intermingle, though they very much do. And now, when fewer mitigations are around, we see people hospitalized with COVID, influenza, and RSV. Why, when mitigations are removed, is COVID no longer so dominate it's pushing the flu out?

> Why, when mitigations are removed, is COVID no longer so dominate it's pushing the flu out?

Because nearly everyone has had it already. The mitigations were removed because Omicron so visibly ignored them that everyone just gave up at that point.

Here in Alberta it's still killing at nearly 5x the rate as the flu, so it's still very much present. Unfortunately, it's impossible to argue further because of the lack of population testing (Alberta only tests those hospitalized), but more people here were found to have COVID this season than influenza[1].

If we're now largely immune to COVID why isn't influenza now pushing it out?

https://www.alberta.ca/stats/dashboard/respiratory-virus-das...

I'm not being clear. The interference appears to be related to how recently you were infected with something else. If lots of people around you are getting COVID, then they aren't getting something else. Once most people are immune to it, they aren't getting infected with it anymore and other viruses can compete again.

> it's still killing at nearly 5x the rate as the flu

The way they define COVID deaths make such numbers incomparable.

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