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
The flu virus always wears a jacket, but it has a lot of different jackets to choose from in its wardrobe. Every year, we try to guess which jacket is going to be the most popular among flu viruses, and that’s mainly what goes in that year’s flu vaccine. But the virus can change jackets relatively quickly (compared to other viruses), so unfortunately this has to be an educated guess. And not all the viruses in a given year are wearing the same jacket, we’re just trying to catch the most popular ones that year.
Sometimes the prediction is good, the predicted jacket is all the rage, and we’re ready for it. Sometimes it’s off, because the flu viruses decided there’s a new hotness *after* that year’s vaccine has been made.
But do not for a second believe any of the BS like “I got the shot last year, don’t need it this year” or “the flu vaccine doesn’t work, my cousin got it and still got the flu”. A, like I said, not all flu viruses are identical, and B, last year’s jackets are old news.
*(A bit more detail: the jacket is the virus’s protein shell. There are two main proteins, H and N. Think of it like a two-tone jacket, and the proteins are different colors. The viruses mix and match H and N to make different jackets. [Hence, the descriptions like “H5N1”: literally the 5th H variant and the 1st N variant.])*
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