1. #Flu activity remains amazingly low this winter.
For the week ending Jan 23, less than 1% of specimens tested for flu came back positive.
In the same week last year, 25.6% of flu tests were positive & there had been +93K positive tests to date. This year: 1276.
Thread.

2. Some news this week: A young child who lives on a farm where pigs are raised contracted swine #influenza. It was a vH3N2 — the "v" in the name means variant, which in flu terminology means a version of #flu that normally circulates in an animal species. The child is fine.

3. Speaking of children, the #flu death toll among kids in 2020-21 stands at 1. In regular flu seasons, somewhere between 100 and 200 children typically will die of flu. Not this year, it seems.

4. Adults aren't dying of #flu this year either, though #Covid19 deaths are more than making up for that. The yellow blips at the bottom of this chart are deaths coded for flu (which would be only a portion of total flu deaths). Nothing in 2020-21. But the Covid deaths....

5. These data are from @CDCgov weekly FluView report. The chart below show this #flu season (red arrow) juxtaposed against several recent others. So little flu. The only season close to it was the 2011-2012 flu season, which came 2 years after the 2009 flu pandemic.

6. To give you a sense of how weird this year's flu curve is, here's a graph from last #flu season, from a bit later in the year. Remember, last season was a bad flu year. It started early, it lasted a long time, it had a double peak. Blue arrow points to this time last year.