Influenza Cases Hit an All-Time Low in Australia in 2021
upstart writes:
Influenza cases hit an all-time low in Australia in 2021:
If you have been thinking the flu has virtually disappeared from our lives, you are not wrong.
In 2020, there were more than 20,000 notifications to the National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System (NNDSS) and 37 deaths.
This year, to August 29, just 484 cases were recorded and zero deaths.
Perhaps surprisingly, almost half of those were in Queensland, with 235 cases, but experts do not have an answer as to why.
Victoria recorded just 75 cases, New South Wales recorded 61 and the next highest was just 31 in the Northern Territory.
WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza's deputy director, Professor Ian Barr, said the majority of the cases were detected in quarantine, coming in from overseas, particularly from India.
"They have been having ongoing influenza circulation for the last three or four months," he said.
"It's not surprising we're picking up a few coming from quarantine."
Mal Greig is the treasurer of the Windsor Bowls Club - a place normally impacted by severe influenza seasons - and said the flu was a "non-existent issue" this year.
"The flu used to impact the club and attendances at the club quite dramatically," Mr Greig said.
Now, he said, it was not even spoken about.
[...] "This is the time we should be seeing not a few hundred, a few thousands cases per state, with tens of thousands of cases overall throughout Australia.
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