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The border controls and quarantine stopped importation to the community, the lockdown on gatherings stopped transmission within the community. Both measures to
by throwaheyy 6y ago
The border controls and quarantine stopped importation to the community, the lockdown on gatherings stopped transmission within the community.
Both measures together likely stopped the flu just as they stopped the coronavirus. Keep in mind that both the flu and Covid are transmitted in the same way, respiratorily, but the flu is much less contagious, so eliminating transmission of the coronavirus is almost certainly also going to eliminate transmission of the flu.
Australia saw a similar effect, the flu season in NSW was one tenth of what it normally is.
- repsilat 6y agoRight, but NZ has had a pretty light lockdown compared to other countries. To use the language of other posts, if the "reservoirs" of influenza were uniformly distributed, we'd expect NZ to have more flu than the United States or Europe where (time-integrated) lockdowns have been stricter. Look at the pre-election videos covering campaigning in New Zealand -- crowds of maskless people, politicians hugging supporters etc. Stadiums full of rugby supporters. Not a COVID transmission risk, but wrt the flu it's obviously no different from a regular season -- except for the borders. In San Francisco people are distancing a lot more. It's understandable why we have more COVID cases, but when winter rolls around it'll be very interesting to see if the same difference in flu cases is seen. A non-uniform distribution of reservoirs might be something we can conclude with borders closed.