People always just say something is “going around” or it’s “flu season”, but how and why does it start at the same time every year? Does it just appear in someone one day as patient 0? Or, if it’s just being passed around, theoretically if we all isolated for like a month (obviously we tried this with covid, but I mean literally 0 contact) would we no longer have seasonal flus?
This question is for both the common cold, sinus-type flu, and the stomach flu
Edit: the quarantine question was purely hypothetical, I know it’s practically impossible in reality
In: 1
There really is no Patient 0. It’s just a word. Patient 0? Take Covid-19. Some people who came back from a visit to China to… well some went to Britain. Some to the U.S. Some to Russia. Pick a place. Pretty much any place. An entire cruise ship, you may remember, was quarantined in Japan. Some late 2019 deaths in the U.S. are suspected of having been from Covid-19. Hundreds of travellers, if not thousands.
Now, about the isolating thing. Yes, you could, but only sort of. I read this great article on npr. Look for the March 30, 2021 article “**Should Masking Last Beyond The Pandemic? Flu And Colds Are Down, Spurring A Debate”**.
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