My personal opinion: Is this flu wave so severe? That’s because the virus survival environment in our country is too good.

Why is this flu so severe? On the one hand, the flu vaccination rate is low , and on the other hand, the pain is forgotten after the scar heals . At the beginning of the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, many people on the Internet believed that COVID-19 infection was a "large flu", and recently, many people who got the flu thought that the flu was definitely a "large COVID-19".

Image source: pexels

Let’s not analyze the severity of different variants of the new coronavirus, and let’s not consider the statement that “long flu and long COVID are similar” that went viral a few days ago (it’s actually false, for details, please refer to Fact Check丨“Long flu” and “Long COVID” are similar? False!), let’s talk about the domestic influenza vaccination rate. I often say that the domestic influenza vaccination rate is less than 4%, but this is actually an exaggeration - in fact, judging from the influenza vaccine batch approval and estimated report vaccination for each influenza season from 2014 to 2021, the vaccination rate for the three influenza seasons from 2014 to 2017 was "less than 1%" - this is still calculated based on 1 shot, without considering that children aged 6 months to 3 years old need to receive 2 doses each year. In addition, even in the 2020-2021 influenza season, the influenza vaccination rate was "only 2.94%". In contrast, at such a low vaccination rate, "only 71.67%" of the vaccines were vaccinated, and the remaining "nearly 30%" was wasted (see the figure below).

In addition, even in areas with large-scale free influenza vaccination programs (for the elderly/students/medical staff, etc.), the vaccination rate is not high (see figure below).

But relatively speaking, the vaccination rate of the corresponding population in areas with public funding or medical insurance reimbursement policies has far exceeded the vaccination rate of the self-paying population (see figure below), but the embarrassing thing is that even with medical insurance reimbursement, the vaccination rate is far lower than that for free.

Judging from the coverage of free vaccination and medical insurance reimbursement policies, even if a free vaccination policy is adopted, the final vaccination rate is still unstable (see figure below).

The above situations can also lead to the following conclusions: 1. Although the protective effect of the vaccine may fluctuate due to the strain matching, under the condition of such a low vaccine coverage rate in China, no matter how well the vaccine strain matches the epidemic strain, the impact on the incidence can be said to be negligible; 2. The influenza vaccination rate can be promoted by free policies (substantially) or medical insurance plans (slightly), but if there is no continuous promotion (through publicity or popular science education, etc.), then the vaccination rate will fluctuate significantly; 3. Even though there are a lot of health economics evaluation data in China that support the cost-effectiveness of influenza vaccination, scientific evidence is often just a decoration, and more money would rather be spent on treatment costs than promoting vaccination; 4. A large amount of vaccine is wasted every year. Even though the waste ratio has continued to decrease in recent years, we should also consider optimizing the distribution mechanism and more flexible deployment to promote vaccination rates; 5. People’s distrust of vaccines (including influenza) often comes not only from the general public’s lack of knowledge, but also from unprofessional medical personnel, who are often more concerned; 6. Although medical and preventive integration requires more than just vaccination, in terms of vaccination, medical and preventive integration is very poor .
=Pill=

Disclaimer: This article was created out of personal interest, only to help more ordinary people have a clearer understanding of vaccines. The content and views do not represent any organization, unit, or institution, and it has not accepted any form of sponsorship. All pictures are from public online platforms. If the content is incorrect, please do more self-criticism (not).