I am a mother of two small children. I have lost the last month to vomiting, sneezing, coughing all night, snot, snot and more snot. It’s not Covid. And that’s before I get to the kids.
You know it’s true, you can feel it. The signs are everywhere. Parents and childless alike drop like flies. It felt like the end of days.
Some call it the twindemic. I think this term is too light. Germs spread, party all night, spread in the 2022 premiere: The Winter The Cold Came Back.
I see now that the email was an omen. It arrived in July. In addition to the ‘rona, my two-year-old’s daycare advised about the circulation of a tummy bug, conjunctivitis, and foot-and-mouth disease on the hands.
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A week later, my little one started throwing up at 2am, because of course it starts in the middle of the night, when you’re in your deepest, most comfortable sleep, according to parenting rules. The next seven days were marked by flushing the toilets, washing up, changing the sheets and apologizing to the supermarket staff for cleaning aisle five (or more accurately, the checkout area).
The following week, the first of the school holidays, our seven-year-old started coughing and was sweaty and sticky with mucus for the next three days. The two year old got it later and so did I. If you don’t have children, it’s hard to express the misery of being sick but not being able to be properly while trying to comfort and entertain a small, overheated disease vector, without leaving the house.
Michelle Duff/Things
Ahikāroa Duff Witehira, 2, and Nukutawhiti Duff Witehira, 7, enjoy a moment of brotherly peace. Don’t let this picture fool you.
By the third week the kids were better, but I was in hell. The RATs said it wasn’t Covid, which I had already had. I coughed all night. I had a headache. The snot came in the rivers. Was this how a cold was and I just forgot? I slept all day. There were no doctor appointments for two weeks.
When I got it right, with the help of the ER doctor’s antibiotics for what ended up being a sinus infection, it marked four weeks of family illness. I don’t even know how much sickness left my husband and I. days Weeks.
When your child has a tummy bug, they cannot return to daycare for 48 hours after their last incident. Some daycare centers now send children home with runny noses. And when your child isn’t in daycare, you can’t work and still pay the fees. Kiwis took twice as much sick leave in June as the previous month, and there are many whānau who don’t even have that.
Everywhere you look, someone else is muting their microphone to have a coughing fit. After two years of few winter illnesses, do we have no immunity to fight even the most pathetic of viruses? Have we all turned into some sort of criminal or are we being hit with some particularly virulent version of a super flu?
Twice as likely to report a cold
In the public interest but also to validate myself, I call the virologist Dra. Sue Huang, Principal Researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Research (ESR). Is everyone sick? Is it as bad as we think?
The short answer: yes. And maybe a little worse.
Dr. Huang explores yet-to-be-published data suggesting that this year, our level of respiratory illness, which includes the common cold, is more than double what it was last year.
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ESR principal investigator and virologist Dr Sue Huang says there are more colds this year and they’re hitting us harder.
The WellKiwis study, an annual research project involving more than 3,000 Wellingtonians in 2022, has twice as many people reporting a cough, fever, illness, runny nose, sore throat or other respiratory symptoms as in 2021. It’s a snapshot of what can be expected in the community, says Dr. Huang.
At the peak of the weekly survey, the reported disease rate was 102 per 1,000. When people report symptoms, they are asked to get tested to see if it is the flu.
These results suggest that when it comes to the flu, we’re a staggering seven times sicker this year than we were before the pandemic. “When you look at those who were tested and got the flu, that’s extremely high,” says Dr. Huang. “This winter is quite an intense winter, with so many diseases.”
In 2020 and 2021, no influenza or Covid-19 was detected among survey participants. (Delta, which devastated Auckland last year, had not yet arrived in Wellington due to lockdown measures.)
At this year’s peak, 22 per 1,000 tested positive for flu, compared with 3.3 per 1,000 in 2018-19.
This was at levels comparable to Covid, which measured around 27 per 1000.
The only other significant diseases during the trial period were RSV, which peaked at 18 per 1000 in 2021 after the brief quarantine-free period with Australia in July, when it was imported.
At the more severe end, at its peak this year, flu-related hospitalizations were the highest New Zealand has seen for a decade, and almost three times worse than pre-pandemic levels, says the Dr. Huang.
This happened in mid-June, which is also much earlier than in previous years; flu season is usually at its worst in August.
In the last two years, we have had almost no flu. In those years, the combined ESR reported just 19 cases nationwide, compared with about 5,000 pre-pandemic and nearly 5,500 so far this year. (These are only the cases reported to ESR from hospitals and other laboratories, so they represent a small proportion of the total).
The end of the “vacation of immunity”
We don’t imagine it, then. The next question is: why?
It is a combination of three factors.
At the end of February, New Zealand abandoned quarantine measures and began to reopen the border. Along with Covid-19, this opened the door to strains of influenza, rhinoviruses (the common cold), human metapneumovirus and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
While we are still at the orange light, the restrictions are nothing compared to the months of confinement, working from home and social distancing of the previous two years.
So the first two reasons we’re sick are the most obvious: there are more germs around, and because we’re all mixing together again, they’re spreading more easily.
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Our natural immunity to even the common cold has been depleted in recent years as there have been fewer viruses coming into the country and we have socially distanced ourselves.
Next is immunity.
Normally, our bodies are exposed to various germs, or microbes, that build our defenses as a population against the spread of disease.
This season is, according to immunologist Helen Petousis-Harris, the recovery from the “immune vacation” we’ve had for the past two years.
“Usually you’re exposed to a lot of viruses and a lot of times you don’t realize it, but what you’re doing is maintaining immunity and cross-protection.”
With a build-up of immunity, people may not get sick at all or expect to have a milder case.
This year, when we encounter a virus, we don’t have that resistance “ready to go,” he says. So we are more likely to get hit, and does that mean we hit ourselves more? “If you’ve never been exposed to something, you’re going to have a more severe infection,” confirms Dr. Huang.
Babies and young children are among the most vulnerable. While the peak of respiratory illness has eased for adults, ESR figures show hospitalizations for under-fives have risen in recent weeks. Dr Jin Russell, a community pediatrician in Auckland, says he is treating many more children with the flu.
This is because pandemic babies have almost no natural protection. “We have a crop of very young children who haven’t been exposed to the flu and don’t have immunity,” says Dr. Russell. “This has been a particularly difficult winter.”
The best way to protect yourself from the flu is vaccination. It helps boost antibodies, so when you do encounter the virus, you have a self-made army ready to fight it.
However, the government was slow to fund flu shots for children aged three and over, starting on July 1.
And people got vaccinated later than last year – numbers are higher now, with almost 25% of the population vaccinated, but they were behind in June when it peaked.
This year we got sicker, earlier, also because we were less equipped to fight it, but it’s not too late. Dr Dianne Sika-Paotonu, an immunologist and senior lecturer in pathology and molecular medicine at the University of Otago, says it’s still important to get the flu shot as there could be a resurgence later in the year and hospitals are already under strain.
This is also true of childhood vaccinations for other diseases: a drop in coverage has increased the risk of outbreaks of whooping cough, measles and other preventable diseases.
It’s not just us, or is it?
There’s also one last purely sociological theory as to why this winter feels particularly harsh.
Psychology teaches us that human memories can be short and selective. That’s why we have more babies, remember the good things about ex-partners and repress the trauma.
Have we all forgotten how bad colds are?
Combined with general fatigue from illness, the state of some of our housing and the rising cost of living, it’s no wonder these past few months (if you’re really panning for gold, the past two years) have felt, literally, like the dark ages.
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