Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

7 INFECTION CONTROL What's 'flurona'?: 6 things to know By Gabrielle Masson T hough the concept isn't new, concurrent COVID-19 and flu infections have been dubbed "flurona" as more cases have been publicly reported, e Washington Post reported Jan. 5. Six things to know: 1. "Flurona" became a popular internet search term aer Israel's Beilinson Hospital on Dec. 30 reported two pregnant women testing positive for both COVID-19 and flu. ey were treated to reduce their fevers, placed in isolation and eventually le with healthy babies, Arnon Vizhnitser, the hospital's director of gynecol- ogy, told the Post. 2. Flu and COVID-19 co-infections aren't new. A study from China in January 2020 found zero cases of coinfection among 99 COVID-19 patients, but a follow-up a month later at a COVID-19 hospital found about 1 in 8 patients had both illnesses at the same time, according to e Atlantic. Co-infection cases were reported in the U.S. nearly two years ago. 3. Both respiratory infections can prompt similar symptoms, such as fever, coughing, fatigue, runny nose, body aches, sore throat and diarrhea. Both can be fatal. 4. Experts say COVID-19 and flu vaccines are the best way to prevent severe infections. "If you are vaccinated, the disease is very mild," Dr. Vizhnitser said of both COVID-19 and the flu. "Women who were not vaccinated [against the coronavirus] were very sick." 5. While many countries track COVID-19 and flu cases, there's little data on co-infections. Edsel Salvana, MD, a member of a technical advisory group to the Philippines health department, said such co-infections aren't unusual and that the Philippines' first COVID-19 death was an early pandemic patient who had COVID-19 and influenza B, along with streptococcus pneumonia, according to ABS-CBN News. However, other experts disagree on the prevalence of co-infections. David Edwards, PhD, aerosol scientist and bioengineering professor at Cambridge, Mass.-based Harvard University, told Bloomberg, "e probability of both of those things happening at the same time is sort of like the probabil- ity of getting robbed by two people on the same day. It happens, but it's not like people should think, 'Oh, there's gonna be this flurona that's going to overtake omicron.' at's not going to happen." 6. Despite the term's rising popularity, not everyone is a fan. "Stop this 'flurona' BS. Co-infections of circulating respiratory viruses happen all the time," Angela Rasmussen, PhD, a virologist affiliated with Washington, D.C.-based Georgetown University, tweeted Jan. 5. In a follow-up tweet, she added, "ey can, obviously, cause co-infections (infect the same host at the same time). is has un- predictable results in terms of pathology but it doesn't necessarily make you twice as sick." n Omicron may have 3-day incubation period, shortest of any variant: 6 things to know By Gabrielle Masson O micron may have an average incubation period of three days, shorter than any variant yet, according to preliminary findings from studies cited by The Atlantic. Six things to know: 1. The exposure-to-symptom gap, called the incubation period, is estimated to be about five to six days for the original strain, five days for the alpha variant and four days for delta. 2. A research paper published Dec. 16 by Eurosurveil- lance describes an outbreak involving 80 people at a restaurant in Norway. Nearly every person who had omi- cron said they were vaccinated and had received a neg- ative antigen-test result within two days before the party. After the event, symptoms appeared in about three days. This suggests the virus had multiplied so quickly that rapid-test results had been rendered obsolete. Almost all individuals reported at least one symptom and more than half (54 percent) reported fever. 3. The research findings from Norway are preliminary and might not represent the general population, though they appear to match with other early, sometimes-anecdotal reports, according to The Atlantic. 4. Ajay Sethi, PhD, epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, still wants more data before asserting omicron has a shorter incubation period, he told The Atlan- tic. But "it does make sense," Dr. Sethi said, considering the variant's explosive growth. Omicron has quickly become the dominant strain in the U.S., accounting for 98 percent of new infections for the week ending Jan. 8, according to CDC data. That's up from 13 percent from the week ending Dec. 11, 2021. 5. "If omicron has a shorter incubation period, that's going to wreak havoc on how we test for it and deal with it," Omai Garner, PhD, director of clinical microbiology at UCLA Health, told The Atlantic. As the virus travels more rapidly, it will also get harder to control. 6. Incubation periods might differ by vaccination status, underlying health conditions, infection history, age and the amount of viral load people face. n

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