Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health experts have worried about people getting infected with the influenza virus and SARS-CoV-2 at the same time, a disease sometimes called flurona. Now, a multi-year study of hospital patients offers some of the most comprehensive data on how frequent flurona cases are—and who seems to be getting them the most.
The study, which is not yet peer reviewed, shows that flurona cases have been happening throughout the pandemic but are so far relatively rare.
However, experts stress that flurona is not at all likely to lead to genetic exchanges between viruses and cause more severe hybrid forms of either the flu or COVID-19. “While it’s possible, in theory, for such gene swaps to occur, the chances of this occurring are very, very low and would almost certainly result in a non-viable virus,” says Stephen Goldstein, an evolutionary virologist at Eccles Institute of Human Genetics at the University of Utah.
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Study co-author Andrew Badley, an infectious disease physician-scientist at the Mayo Clinic, Minnesota, adds that “the main take-home message of [our study] is that co-infections do occur, and therefore we have to take that concept seriously.”
