Corona amping up AND Flu season

[specialmom]

I'm wondering how all this will work.  I'll get my flu vaccine but if you become ill, will you get both a flu test and a covid test?  Will they prioritize one over the other?  Can someone have both at the same time?  What happens then?!

[mkh9]

Yes They have a test for both flu and Covid19. So if you get symptoms of the flu, I believe they are going to test for both. I am probably going to try to get my flu vaccine before the Sarscov2 (corona virus) vaccine becomes available. I don't know how they are going to administer either one without making people sick. Perhaps a drive through?
mkh9

[AnxiousNoMore]

I am due for my second pneumonia shot in November too. Flu is almost wiped out in the southern hemisphere at present .https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-08-26/covid-19-lockdowns-blocked-flu-in-some-places-but-fall-looms  
I also read that S Africa had much higher uptake of flu vax this year because people didn't want to risk it with Covid, which was a reason for low flu numbers but this article doesn't mention that.

[Paxiled]

I think you will only be tested for either one if you ask for it.  I've been alive 67 years and I've never once been tested for the flu.  Nor do most people go to the doc when they have the flu, as unless you're very old or very young or in the hospital dying of something else you probably have never gone to the doctor when you were sick and might have had the flu.  You also might have had a cold or something else.  Now that covid is with us, I'm guessing if you go to the doctor, and I'm guessing more people will do that now that covid is with us, they will test you but there's no guarantee of that even now.  Most of us have still never been tested.  So if you think you have the flu you've got to assume now you have covid and get tested, I would think, because of the quarantine factor even if you don't have symptoms bad enough for hospital care.  My wife and I have never gotten the flu shot, as we're both very healthy in that way -- we have our problems, and I have a lot of them, but not that kind of problem -- but we've talked about it and I think this is the year we get the flu shot.  But remember, the best year the flu shot ever had was 40-50% effective and most years it isn't effective at all.  The flu has been around so long it has mutated over and over and over and so the flu vaccine has to guess well in advance of flu season which 5 mutations are most likely that year.  If they guess right, it works better.  If they guess wrong, it doesn't.  As for getting covid by going to the doctor, I don't know if that's a risk or not.  It depends on how crowded your practice gets and how they've adapted, but I'm guessing they've got the social distancing down and are requiring masks.  It's not like being in a hospital.  And even in a hospital now, they've got segregated wings for the covid patients.  I haven't heard of these facilities having big problems.  I've been to the dentist and the endodontist a couple times each during covid and they don't have patients stacked up in the waiting room and everyone must wear a mask.  It's not no danger, but if you do need to go to the doctor, it's probably okay to do so.  

[AnnieBrooke]

One thing that has made testing for the flu lots more common in the past decade than before (at least in my world, which includes a lot of elementary-age children), is that now there is something that can be done for flu. Last winter, something very unpleasant went around the grade school where I volunteer that had 25-kid classrooms with 9 kids out sick, and all the young moms were talking about having taken their child to the doctor and learning it was the flu. The reason they did it (instead of just assuming it was flu and staying home), is that Tamiflu is effective at shortening the time someone has the flu and making them feel a lot better fast, especially if the person is a child. I didn't know Tamiflu was that good: I remember when it was first developed, I think, and the stories were sort of meh because it doesn't *cure* the flu. But now I've heard story after story from the moms about how fast their kid felt better once taking it, and how they got well in like over a weekend. I don't prefer to go to the doctor when I'm sick, and of course Covid has changed the whole approach to going to the doctor when you might be contagious. (And some of those mommies probably had pretty fancy insurance to allow them that fast of access to a doctor!) But it's worth knowing that Tamiflu is out there. By all reports, unless one waits around to get tested until they've been sick for a few days, it does shorten the length of time that one is ill with flu (even adults), it evidently makes the sick person less contagious to others, and especially, it seems to make the person feel a lot better quickly.

[Paxiled]

My wife and I tend to have very different experiences when we get sick.  Now, we never have any idea what it is we have because we don't go to the doctor.  We've had illnesses so often by now as we're in our sixties that we know it will go away.  But I take stuff for it and she doesn't and my few illness experiences are much shorter than my wife's and much less intense.  At least, so far.  I take olive leaf and elderberry extract, and immune system stimulant, and suck on zinc lozenges when I get sick and as soon as I get sick.  Those first two herbs have some anti-viral properties.  My wife doesn't do that and won't do that, and so she tends to get sicker.  I'm sure Tamiflu works better and is stronger, but I do try to stay away from medication as much as possible because I've been on a lot of them for my anxiety over the years and so I try to minimize the number of toxic things I consume.  All meds are toxic in some way, so it's always a balancing act.  You make a good point about getting tested, but to do that you have to go to the doctor and I never have if what I feel are flu-like symptoms.  With covid around, that philosophy becomes a possible pathway to big problems, since the symptoms are so similar.  The outcomes are quite dissimilar.  I'm an old fogey, and we were raised to just wait stuff out.  Our parents never took us to the doctor for such things.  It wasn't done.  This is not really funny but in hindsight it is, the only time I ever even telephoned a doctor about flu symptoms was when I was in graduate school and I couldn't sleep and called asking if there was something that could help me stop feeling so lousy so I could sleep.  I had just had a physical, and when my doc got word I called he checked the results and they called me and told me to get to the hospital immediately.  It turned out I had a bleeding ulcer, or so they think, they never actually found it but assumed that's what it was because antacids stopped the problem.  So folks, sometimes calling a doc can save your life.  Peace.