Vaccinate, isolate, ventilate: will we finally learn the lessons from covid this flu season?

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas—Christmas 2020, that is. Surging infections, rising hospital admissions, and schools closing under the weight of infection.1 This time it is flu rather than covid-19 making headlines and there are important differences in who it affects and how. But we trivialise seasonal influenza at our peril.2 Many of the lessons we learnt during the covid pandemic about what needs to be done to ease the spread of infection still apply, although we are consistently failing to follow them.You won’t remember the flu waves of 2020/21 because there weren’t any. Covid measures effectively controlled the flu virus. We talked at the time of “building back better,” using the lessons of covid to improve future responses, especially to predictable winter pressures. It is frustrating that, five years on, governments and institutions are still ignoring lessons about the systemic measures that are necessary if people are…