A few weeks ago @ClareCraigPath, @RealJoelSmalley and I wrote a short piece on endemic Covid, and what it might look like.

It seems particularly relevant to current

Consider the possibility that all our naso-pharynxes together make up a single ecosystem, in which only one predator can be completely dominant.

We are not saying that this has definitely happened with Covid - but it would explain the disappearance of flu this year.

Every winter, we see "excess deaths" in the sense that more (mainly elderly) people die in the winter than in the summer.

This is a worldwide phenomenon.

It is now thought that all or nearly all of the extra deaths in Winter are due to infection with winter respiratory viruses, mainly

However, we do not - and never have - extensively tested for the presence of such viruses in the critically ill elderly population, so we really have no idea how frequently infection is present, or in fact what its contribution to death is.