(Maja Kappler/ Healthing) — Just what we need, after our Delta-ridden summer: a bad flu season. “The flu is still out there, just waiting for us to lower our guard,” Forbes reported earlier this month, ominously.
While it’s hard to predict with any certainty, experts say this year’s flu could be hard for a number of reasons. The first is the flu itself, which has the potential to infect a ton of people.
Last year, flu numbers were way down, in large part because we weren’t seeing other people and because more people got flu shots than in previous years. That’s a good thing, of course — doctors were worried about a simultaneous “twindemic” of COVID and the flu that could overflow hospitals. But it also means that this year, there’s less flu immunity than there would be after a year with a lot of flu cases. (…)