COVID-19 patients who have been hospitalized should be routinely tested for flu, researchers have said. The call was made after the publication of a paper in the medical journal the Lancet that revealed having both conditions more than doubles the risk of a patient dying.
Scientists also discovered that individuals who had contracted both SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses were more than four times more likely to require ventilation support and 2.4 times more likely to die than if they just had COVID-19.
“We found that the combination of COVID-19 and flu viruses is particularly dangerous,” said Professor Kenneth Baillie of Edinburgh University. “We expect that COVID-19 will circulate with flu, increasing the chance of co-infections. That is why we should change our testing strategy for COVID-19 patients in hospital and test for flu much more widely.”