Resources for covering the 2022-23 flu season

Photo by Polina Tankilevitch: via pexels

It may well appear to be a bit like the boy who cried wolf, but public health and fitness officials are at the time all over again urging the public to be anxious about a “twindemic” of COVID-19 and flu this coming winter season.

The cause: A mix of a difficult flu season in the southern hemisphere, the close of pandemic social distancing and masking behaviors, and the potential for one more SARS-CoV-2 variant, specialists say.

“We need to be worried,” Richard Webby, Ph.D., an infectious disorder expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Clinic told NPR about this year’s forthcoming flu year. “I do not automatically imagine it is operate-for-the-hills worried. But we want to be concerned.”

Overall health reporters could want to tune into the CDC’s annual flu briefing on Tuesday, Oct. 4 (This yr it will be on-line), wherever two CDC and three medical professional experts will response the media’s issues about the flu. Take a look at this webpage to sign up.

A extreme flu year is notoriously tricky to predict since the influenza virus mutates, but the southern hemisphere just wrapped up the most extreme flu period considering the fact that the pandemic began, suggesting the probability that a lengthy-feared “twindemic” of each flu and COVID-19 instances could arise just after two many years of traditionally gentle flu seasons.

Frequently, experts search to what has transpired in the southern hemisphere (it is winter season in the southern hemisphere when it is summer season in the northern hemisphere) to foretell what could take place in Europe and the Americas all through the wintertime time.

In the meantime, there are studies from northern Europe that new COVID-19 conditions and hospitalizations are mounting all over again, and scientists are closely looking at whether a new variant of SARS-CoV-2 may sweep the globe as it did previous wintertime. Frequently, the U.S. has been a few months powering Europe in the rise of new COVID-19 cases.

If the “twindemic” takes place this wintertime, it would further more pressure the U.S. health and fitness procedure which is previously under duress from two and fifty percent a long time of COVID-19 response.

“Overall,” Helen Chu, Ph.D., M.P.H., a health practitioner and flu skilled at the College of Washington instructed the Atlantic, “we are not effectively well prepared.”

Really do not those terms seem common to all of us in the overall health treatment journalism area?

To assist you with your reporting, examine out this tip sheet for reporting on the flu, up to date for the 2022-23 winter period.

Running Editor Erica Tricarico is a graduate of Howard University and the master’s software in journalism at CUNY. Tricarico will come to AHCJ from MJH Lifetime Sciences in Cranbury, N.J., wherever she managed an editorial crew manufacturing material on animal care. Right before that, she was a freelance health care reporter for Each day Well being.