Seasonal Flu Cut Short

Seasonal flu kills 290,000-650,000 people every year. This year, the flu seasons seems to have been cut short by about 6 weeks, according to WHO reported cases in the northern hemisphere.

Here's my piece in Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01538-8

What does this mean? It's hard to say.
1. It's possible that the decline is due to fewer people turning up at clinics with the flu, so not showing up in the statistics. But the WHO says that social distancing is also a likely factor.
2. I was surprised by just how seasonal the regular flu is... it really peaks in Feb and dies right down by end May (around about right now). If the COVID virus is the same, then we should expect a quiet summer. But no ones knows if the novel coronavirus is seasonal or not... it is spreading in warm spots like Singapore, so it might not be.
3. Other diseases, like chickenpox, measles and rubella, are also declining, possibly because of school closures.
4. These diseases being cut short will save lives for a while... but for how long? Will those lives be lost to something else in the near future? Or not? Regardless, the global shutdown doesn't seem to be a sustainable way to save tens of thousands of lives... from flu or anything else. (It IS perhaps an important way to save tens of millions of lives!)
4. Sexually transmitted diseases are an interesting case: transmission has likely been stemmed for a while, but rates could skyrocket once social distancing ends and un-detected cases are let loose.
5. TB could skyrocket, which is very sad indeed...