Geo tv news
IANS: Once known as the common cold, the disease has claimed two lives in Karnataka and Haryana. Children under the age of 5 are reportedly ending up in the ICU. Your comments?
Flu: H3N2 generally causes a mild flu-like condition. But in extreme ages — children and the elderly and those with comorbidities — it can cause serious illness and they can be hospitalized. In some cases, they may also require admission to the ICU because of severe pneumonia.
For this reason, we encourage appropriate behavior to Covid, especially in the high-risk group, and we also increase vaccination for prevention in the high-risk group and in many people of extreme age.
IANS: Why is there a rise in flu cases? Is the severity more this time because Covid has weakened our immune system?
Guleria: The flu is not a new phenomenon, every year there are patients who enter the hospital and the ICU because of a serious infection. But it may be a little more this year.
The virus regularly undergoes what we call antigenic drift; and how the coronavirus continues to mutate. So it’s natural for the virus to mutate a bit, leading to a higher chance of infection. That is why there is a vaccine that is taken annually, because every year the virus undergoes a small change or mutates to a certain extent.
I don’t think there is a connection between the increase in H3N2 and Covid. Theoretically, it is possible that because there has been less flu in the last couple of years, there has been a decrease in what we would see in the natural immunity inherent in the population.
Another reason is that Covid has been the dominant virus as far as the respiratory tract is concerned in the last two years.
The fact that we were following appropriate behavior for Covid also protected us from the flu.
