This year’s flu shot will be missing a strain of influenza it’s protected against for more than a decade.

That’s because there have been no confirmed flu cases caused by the Influenza B/Yamagata lineage since spring 2020. And the Food and Drug Administration decided this year that the strain now poses little to no threat to human health.

Scientists have concluded that widespread physical distancing and masking practiced during the early days of COVID-19 appear to have pushed B/Yamagata into oblivion.

  • @melisdrawing
    68•1 month ago

    That’s really cool. Glad to know we stopped the spread… of something.

    • @[email protected]
      44•1 month ago

      Imagine if we didn’t have some meaningful percentage of the population being jackasses having Covid parties and more deciding that covering their face in public during a pandemic was some kind of politics bullshit…

      • metaStatic
        28•1 month ago

        now imagine there was a hard lockdown the instant we knew it was necessary and the whole thing was over in a month.

        • Logi
          5•1 month ago

          It wouldn’t have worked. You’d never have gotten every single last case and then the exponential growth would have started again. Or, if that had somehow magically worked, the virus would have come back from outside.

          There were no simple solutions.

        • @[email protected]
          3•1 month ago

          There was as much of a lockdown as there could be. People need food, and some jobs were actually needed to make that happen. Most stuff actually did close.

          • Rhaedas
            16•1 month ago

            The wiki for the COVID timeline is fascinating to read as history and not living it. We (US and the world) really didn’t know how to react, and it showed. How long there was any type of lockdown is debatable. It was different for each state in when and how much, and how long. Once the “essential worker” word came out, everything became essential. Then there’s the whole politicizing of wearing masks.

            • @[email protected]
              2•1 month ago

              And from my anecdotal experience, lockdowns varied greatly locally as well. We had what I would call “rolling lockdowns” here, where a town might close restaurants and stuff for a few weeks before opening back up while neighboring towns would have mask mandates only. Some would go as far as total lockdowns, and many almost never had an actual lockdown. And it was all based on the waves of COVID infections. Towns would only act once they hit a certain threshold of daily infections.

              I had a job during lockdown where I had a form stating I could drive on the state highways for work and up near the major city I might see 4 or 5 cars on the road when there should’ve been rush hour traffic, but in my town the only businesses that really closed were bars and restaurants, and that was only until they started adding outdoor seating and plexiglass walls between tables.

              And then you had stuff like a girl I know posting pictures of herself drinking in a packed bar in South Carolina at the height of COVID, not a single mask in sight.