COVID-19 and influenza epidemics this winter?

On January 31, 2020, the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) declared a Public Health Emergency followed by the declaration of a National Emergency by the President of the United States.1,2 Congress granted $25 billion to HHS to take immediate steps to prepare for the advancing COVID-19 pandemic, and soon thereafter, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) created the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics Initiative (RADx)3 whose task, as implied, was to accelerate the delivery of diagnostic tests to healthcare facilities and laboratories across the nation. Reduced hospitalizations and deaths were observed in locations where lockdowns, school closures, social distancing, mask-wearing, and workfrom-home programs were common.4,5 This protection by NPI, although not absolute, provided HHS and partnering industries the time needed to take steps to address the emergency. Both surges failed to achieve the higher positivity rates encountered in more "typical" influenza epidemic seasons when positivity rates often exceed 25% nationally.7 Both influenza surges overlapped with the arrivals of the Omicron variant in early December 2021 and its subvariants, BA.4 and BA.5, after the new year, spanning the same period from December 2021 to April 2022 and beyond.7 It is possible that public announcements about the rapid increase in COVID-19 cases and deaths (see Figure 2) stimulated a renewed enthusiasm for using NPI, thereby also mitigating the influenza surges. With over 20 years of experience in the medical diagnostics industry, Sush was a founding member of the research and product development laboratory at ViraCor Laboratories, serving as a molecular assay development scientist in the transplant infectious disease field.