A handful of people in the country have contracted coronavirus and the flu simultaneously, one here in the Bay Area, and the double-whammy co-infection threat is real.
President Trump’s cooked-up claim that COVID-19 is “like a flu” has not just gone away, even after he himself contracted the virus. Once a patient hits the hospital, COVID-19 is five times deadlier, according to a recent study in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. But doctors are finding you can get the two deadly infections at the same time, and that’s hitting close to home here in the Bay Area, as KPIX reports that Solano County has reported the Bay Area's first patient with both COVID-19 and the flu.
We know the patient is under 65, so that’s troubling since it can occur in the not-elderly population, though we don’t know anything else about the patient’s profile. Solano County public health officer Dr. Bela T. Matyas said in a statement that “important to note that flu is not COVID-19, which is caused by a different virus, and that the flu is not the same as the common cold, which is also caused by different viruses.” Solano County is inching back toward the highest risk purple tier, Matyas announced Tuesday.
Doctors have been telling us that this was coming, as the Cureus Journal of Medical Science published a study on three such cases in August. Iowa currently has two coronavirus-flu co-infections, and Tennessee has one.
These may seem like very small numbers, but that’s how these things start.Recall that the Bay Area had seemingly negligible case numbers back in early March when a couple dozen cases on a cruise ship seemed like all we had to worry about.
This news comes on the day we learned that there are now nine million coronavirus cases in the U.S., thanks to the latest surge. Solano County is urging people to get flu shots, advice that really applies to the whole Bay Area.
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