Influenza Vaccine Could Prevent Severe Effects of COVID-19

The second wave of COVID-19 has caused higher mortality across the globe than the first one. Researchers have now found that flu vaccines could provide an extended protection against severe effects of COVID patients.

While vaccines against COVID-19 prove to be effective in reducing mortality, vaccinating a large number of people is still a challenge.

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‘People who had not got their flu jabs were up to 20% more likely to seek ICU admission and 58% more likely to visit the Emergency Department because of the illness caused by COVID-19 infection.’

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Ms. Susan Taghioff and team of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine screened electronic health records of more than 70 million patients from countries including the US, UK, Germany, Italy, Israel, and Singapore. After this, around 37,377 patients were chosen and clustered up based on the factors like age, gender, ethnicity, smoking, and health issues.

These people were divided into two groups of which people from the first group had got flu jabs between two weeks and six months before being diagnosed with COVID-19 and people from the second group got COVID-19 but not the flu vaccines.

The development of severe covid effects like sepsis, stroke, deep vein thrombosis pulmonary embolism, acute respiratory distress syndrome, heart attack, pneumonia within 120 days of testing positive for COVID-19 was monitored between these two groups. The severity of the disease was also evaluated based on the details of emergency department visits, ICU admission, and death.

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Based on the analyses, they found that people who had not got their flu jabs were up to 20% more likely to seek ICU admission and 58% more likely to visit the Emergency Department. They were also up to 40% more likely to develop deep vein thrombosis, 45% more likely to develop sepsis, and 58% more likely to experience stroke.

"Despite this, the influenza vaccine is by no means a replacement for the COVID-19 vaccine, and we advocate for everyone to receive their COVID-19 vaccine if able to. Regardless of the degree of protection afforded by the influenza vaccine against adverse outcomes associated with COVID-19, simply being able to conserve global healthcare resources by keeping the number of influenza cases under control is reason enough to champion continued efforts to promote influenza vaccination," said Ms.Taghioff

Test your Knowledge on Coronavirus (COVID-19)
Coronavirus is a large positive-strand RNA virus that is surrounded by a protein envelope. The virus obtains its name from the S protein spikes on its surface, which resemble a crown. The overall pattern of increasing coronavirus cases is shown to spike up with the “second wave” of COVID-19.

With spiking effects of the second wave of coronavirus, the best way to keep it at bay is to follow COVID-appropriate safety practices like wearing a mask, regularly cleaning your hands, and coughing into a bent elbow or tissue along with physical distancing (6 feet about 2 arm's length), that may help evade the severity of COVID-19 infection.

Source-Medindia

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