Health experts encourage everyone every year to get a flu shot, but this year especially so.
It's fair to say that the pandemic has given all an education on viral activity, and also how our decisions and actions affect others.
It’s extremely difficult to forecast this flu season. COVID-19 measures last fall and winter meant a particularly low season.
“That may mean that we have not had the usual augmentation of immunity in our population that we would have had had a bunch of people been exposed to it,” Dr. Frank Rhame, an infectious disease physician at Abbott Northwestern Hospital, said. “You gain a little bit of immunity even when you get exposed to the pathogen that you don’t get sick from at all. It bumps your immunity a little bit, that’s all it does.”
As of March, the Minnesota Department of Health reported 35 hospitalizations and five deaths for the 2020-21 flu season. That’s compared to 197 deaths and more than 4,000 hospitalizations in the 2019-2020 flu season.
“They should get (the flu vaccine) and they should get them reasonably promptly,” Dr. Rhame said. “They should get them because concurrent disease between influenza and COVID-19 is very severe. You don’t want both at the same time.
“We also want to get as few people with influenza in the hospital this year just because our ICUs are full not only with COVID patients but they usually fill up with influenza patients,” he said. "We’re at the limit and that is true statewide.”
The vaccines are available starting this week. MDH advises everyone 6 months and up getting a flu vaccine. Those most at risk are children under 5, those over 65, pregnant women and people with chronic health conditions such as asthma.
The vaccines for COVID-19 and the flu are safe to have in close succession, but they provide protection for two different viruses.