Flurona Happens when Covid-19n and the Flu are Combined

While 2021 followed the previous year’s trend of focusing on COVID-19 and coronavirus variations, 2022 began with a new name that is now part of the pandemic lexicon: Flurona. The name implies that it is a mix of influenza and a novel coronavirus, with patients becoming sick with both at the same time. People all over the world have been worried about since a lady in Israel was diagnosed with both at the beginning of January, and what it could imply for the world already battling COVID-19 and all its various variations.

Despite its name, Flurona is not a genuine fusion of COVID-19 and the flu that has combined to generate a super disease that could wipe out our species. Rather, is a phrase used to describe having both COVID-19 and the flu at the same time. It’s not just not a new sickness, but it’s also not a new phenomenon. Despite initial stories circulating throughout the world that a woman had both the flu and COVID-19, this was not the figurative Flurona patient zero.

No, Flurona has been around for at least two years, albeit it wasn’t called that at the time. The Atlantic published an article in November 2021 about a case from February 2020, when the pandemic was still in its early stages. A man had gone to a medical institution in Queens at the time and had been diagnosed with the flu. He was tested again, and he tested positive for COVID-19 as well by early March. This father, his wife, and their two children were early cases, having contracted the disease at the start of the pandemic. These weren’t even the first instances. No, those could just be findings from a study published in China in early 2020, which found a high number of instances of flu and coronavirus infection at the same time.

It’s also not simply restricted to these two locations. Flurona cases had already been discovered in the United States, Brazil, Hungary, the Philippines, and even Israel before this latest research helped define the name, according to The Washington Post. According to Dr. Edsel Salvana of the Philippine Health Department’s technical advisory committee, the first COVID-19 death outside of China (which occurred in the Philippines) in early 2020 was due to co-infection, as reported by ABS-CBN. According to Salvana, this patient was a Chinese national who was infected with COVID-19, influenza, and Streptococcus pneumonia at the same time.