It might be too much information, but I wasn’t feeling too great Friday and Saturday after New Year’s Eve. With nearly every restaurant in my state closed by 9:30 PM – and my having only one drink – it sure wasn’t due to a hangover. It might have been related to some food I ate, perhaps some unresolved stress, or maybe even…dare I say it…the flu bug. But no matter: By late Saturday afternoon I was back to my old self again (except for maybe some unresolved stresses).

However, my temporary malady did cause me to check the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to see how the flu season was going in this age of COVID-19. And I noticed an interesting comparison, based on numbers from the CDC’s official reporting tool “FluView“:

2020-2021 Influenza Season, United States:

Well, based on their numbers it seems if I did have the flu I was very unlucky, as there were less than 200 or so reported flu cases each week for the last three months of 2020.

Less than 200 flu cases per week? Gosh, that sounds very low. So, I compared it to the same numbers from the 2018-2019 Flu Season, when there was no such thing as “COVID-19″:

2018-2019 Influenza Season, United States:

Wow, that’s an eye-opener: For each chart, the numbers on vertical scale indicate the Number of Positive Flu Cases. The numbers differ by 2,000 on the 2018-2019 chart the, but by only 50 on the 2020-2021 chart. During the 2020-2021 flu season the highest number of reported cases during the last three months of 2020 (October thru December) was about 200, reported in the third week of December, while for the same week in 2018 the number of reported flu cases was approximately 7,000 (seven thousand).

Which got me to thinking:  Not only was I cured of whatever I had, but did COVID-19 effectively “cure” the Influenza viruses? Maybe we should ask the CDC.

Thanks for Reading!