1. Corona appears to have outcompeted influenza in a worldwide pandemic. It will become our new ‘flu’

Most people will get corona, sooner or later. More than once. It will mutate to escape our vaxx. We have to stop reacting via mass containment or we will destroy our societies

2. You get the same historical pattern within flu viruses:

Endemic influenza drives seasonal outbreaks, when favourable climate + minor mutations give an edge over local immunity

Every so often, a new pandemic influenza explodes: A strain with better mutations than the rest.

3. This new strain wins & becomes predominant everywhere, much as corona defeated the flu & is now the dominant respiratory virus.

A great many of the influenza-A viruses infecting humans today descend in some way from the 1918 pandemic flu (H1N1: 2nd wave).

4. The 1918 virus killed 50 million people in a world of only 1.8 billion; it also circulated in pigs.

Like corona, the animal source is unknown. It has been sequenced from old samples. Its direct H1N1 descendants caused season flu in humans until the Asian flu pandemic of 1957

5. Asian Flu was an H2N2 influenza A virus. This was the 2nd worldwide pandemic of the 20th c. that we know of (after 1918), and it had the same ecological effect.

It caused the older, H1N1 descendants from 1918 to disappear entirely. Poof, gone, no more H1N1.

6. These H2N2 flus then ruled the earth for a further 11 years, until 1968, when antigenic shift produced a new H3N2 strain, the Hong Kong Flu. This again replaced the prior lineage and dominated.

7. An odd footnote to all this: Those H1N1 descendants of the 1918 pandemic re-emerged suddenly in the 1970s. The strain closely resembled a ‘reference virus’ that had been frozen in 1950. A lab leak or something like that. Related claims about corona are not farfetched

(8a. And yes, I get it. Competition among variants within a single species, like influenza A, is the natural result of one mutation exploiting a niche better & becoming more common among hosts than his co-variants.)

(8b. Competition between different genera of virus is another matter. Nevertheless, whatever the mechanism, it looks like Corona has outcompeted influenza, and this event fits well into the ’punctuated equilibrium’ ecology of seasonal respiratory viruses.)

9. As far as I know, we haven’t sequenced any flu viruses, or viruses causing flu-like illnesses, from before 1918. Even then, we only had samples from 2nd of 3 waves.

Pandemic flue is described from the early modern period at least & 19th-century flus are well documented.

10. It’s possible prior SARS-like coronaviruses underlie some of these historical flu-type pandemics. A lot of harm has come from emphasising the novelty of the Corona pandemic. In truth we have a very narrow historical window. We have no idea what is typical or novel.

11a. Addendum: Is flu really gone? I think so.

Week 12, in mid-March, Corona had taken off in the US. But % positive flu tests (black line) reported to CDC was in freefall, even tho flu testing was then at near-high (very limited corona PCR testing at this point).

11b. Now Germany flu-like illness cases in hospitals. Corona has a different demographic footprint than flu: Almost no kids

The red line is 0-4 year-olds in select German clinics for severe respiratory illness. Note the sudden drop in March. That’s corona.