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
All these kinds of illnesses are caused by viruses that like to mutate a lot. Every mutation has the potential to create a new strain but, like most mutations, most of them don’t do anything useful.
So yes, there’s a patient 0 for every strain…somewhere that mutation happened first. If it happens be better at causing the virus to replicate or infect others then it will tend to spread, if not it will tend to disappear.
This is happening constantly…it’s not seasonal. But the ability of respiratory viruses (flu, cold, etc.) to infect others *is* seasonal, because they don’t survive well when it’s hot & dry. So in the fall/winter we get a lot more infections, a lot more virus replication, a lot more mutations.
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