Morning Distribution for Thursday, February 4, 2021

A [FiveThirtyEight]( email [Morning Distribution]( Thursday, February 4, 2021 Your daily briefing from FiveThirtyEight --------------------------------------------------------------- The Morning Story [CVS Expects To Give 18 Million Flu Shots This Year As Covid Amps Demand]( [How COVID-19 Ended Flu Season Before It Started]( By [Maggie Koerth]( In the third week of 2021, [clinical laboratories nationwide tested 23,549 specimens for influenza](. Of those, just 0.3 percent (65 tests) turned up positive — a number that is, to put it mildly, absolutely wild. “Normally, this time of year, we’d be running 20 to 30 percent positive,” said Lynnette Brammer, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Domestic Influenza Surveillance team. Although the U.S. continues to struggle with COVID-19, it has apparently beaten the flu into submission. Since the end of September, [the combined total of positive flu cases]( identified by both public health and clinical labs is fewer than 1,500. There are high schools with more people in them. The phenomenon is not only in the United States — [worldwide]( [rates of influenza]( are nearly [off-the-charts low](. When you line multiple years up on the same graph, it can even look like there are no cases of flu this year. That’s how out of step we are with the norm. Flu cases plummeted in 2021 Number of specimens and those that tested positive for the flu, plus the share that tested positive, from the CDC’s voluntary networks of clinical and public health laboratories during the third week of January, 2011-2021 Year No. Tested No. Pos. Perc. Pos. 2011 11,067 3,710 33.5% 2012 5,364 320 6.0 2013 20,931 6,393 30.5 2014 17,480 4,680 26.8 2015 34,194 7,983 23.3 2016 20,761 1,658 8.0 2017 41,010 9,250 22.6 2018 75,417 22,642 30.0 2019 45,371 8,864 19.5 2020 65,248 18,967 29.1 2021 36,751 68 0.2 Prior to 2016, the CDC combined test results from clinical and public-health data, and from 2016-2021, it broke the results down by source. We calculated the overall share that tested positive for the flu from 2016-2021. Source: Centers For Disease Control And Prevention That data is mind-blowing, especially because many observers spent the fall worried about a “[twindemic]( The minuscule flu season also raises a few questions: How can there be so many cases of one respiratory illness and so few of another? Why isn’t there always a tidy match between the places with the least COVID-19 and the places with the least flu, or vice versa? And, seriously, are the flu numbers really that low? [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Weekly Listen [Play]( [Just A Quarterback Away From Greatness]( [FiveThirtyEight] [View in browser]( [ABC News]( [Unsubscribe]( Our mailing address: FiveThirtyEight, 47 West 66th Street, New York, NY 10023.