“I’ll be back”: Australia’s experience of flu in 2022

The covid-19 pandemic showed us that non-pharmaceutical interventions such as masks, social distancing, border control, and lockdowns are effective at preventing flu and other respiratory viruses beyond covid. Like most of the world, Australia found that flu virtually disappeared during 2020 and 2021.12 In 2022—with international borders open, most non-pharmaceutical interventions abandoned, the resumption of normal social contact, and waning population protection from exposure to seasonal flu—many expressed concern about a “twindemic” of severe covid-19 and flu, or at the very least an exceptionally severe flu season. Australia’s 2022 flu season was not, it turns out, as severe as expected. Yet it still placed strain on a health system already under pressure from the winter covid-19 wave of the BA.2 variant.The timing of the peaks of covid-19 and flu viruses in Australia didn’t occur at the same time in 2022. Australia experienced an unusually early and short lived peak of…
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