386 - What To Expect From This Year's Flu Season
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 20 October 2021
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There was virtually no flu in the U.S. last year thanks to a confluence of factors including COVID-related mask wearing and social distancing. But, now that more and more of life is "back to normal," what can we expect to see this year? Virologist Dr. Andy Pekosz returns to the podcast to talk with Stephanie Desmon about why a resurgence of flu could complicate the COVID pandemic, how virologists can make predictions about flu when there was so little virus circulating last year, and why it's more important than ever to get your flu shot.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City. |
| 0:20.0 | Our goal is to bring |
| 0:21.7 | scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews |
| 0:27.1 | with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. |
| 0:32.8 | If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jhhhu.edu. |
| 0:40.4 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:46.4 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call. |
| 0:50.4 | Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Johns Hopkins virologist Andy Peckosch about the other vaccine, |
| 0:56.5 | the influenza vaccine. |
| 0:58.2 | They discuss what to expect from this year's flu season after COVID-19 virtually wiped out last |
| 1:03.6 | years and why it's more important than ever to get a flu shot. |
| 1:08.2 | Let's listen. |
| 1:09.3 | Andy Peckosch, thanks so much for joining me. Oh, it's a pleasure to be here, |
| 1:12.7 | as always. So, Andy, let's talk about the flu. So I got my flu shot. I know you got your flu shot. |
| 1:20.1 | There was almost no flu last year. So will we see flu this year? Yeah, so there's a good chance that we will see flu this year. |
| 1:30.0 | And I say that because last year we didn't see flu, but we also didn't see a number of other respiratory viruses. |
| 1:36.2 | We didn't see rhinoviruses that caused the calm and cold. |
| 1:39.6 | We didn't see RSV, which is a virus that infects kids and can cause some rather severe respiratory illness. |
| 1:45.9 | And we didn't see flu. We also had more public health interventions in place last year. |
| 1:50.8 | Now we don't have as many strict public health interventions as we did last year. |
| 1:54.6 | And we have seen a real big surge in rhinovirus cases and common colds. We have seen surges in RSV. And so the next |
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