Anyone who is infected with Covid-19 and seasonal flu at the same time is particularly at risk. This shows a recent observational study for which British researchers tracked the health of over 200,000 SARS-CoV-2 infected people admitted to hospitals between February 6, 2020 and December 8, 2021. 6965 patients were tested for co-infection during their hospital stay. Of these, 583 (8.4 percent) suffered from a combination infection, of which 227 co-infected with influenza viruses, 220 with respiratory syncytial viruses (RSV) and 136 with adenoviruses. The team around Dr. Maaike Swets from the University of Edinburgh recently in the journal “The Lancet”.
It was shown that patients with simultaneous corona and flu infections had to be ventilated four times as often as people who only had Covid-19. This connection was not found for adenoviruses and RSV. The researchers had no information on the vaccination status of the study participants, but most patients were admitted to a hospital before vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 was available.
As in the previous year, there has been no flu wave in Germany so far in the current season, as the Influenza Working Group of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reports in the current weekly report. Case numbers are very low compared to the last five flu seasons before the pandemic, but they have been increasing for the past two weeks. This trend could continue: protective measures against the corona virus, which are now abolished, also protect against other infectious diseases that can be transmitted by droplets.
DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00383-X