Ms. Susan Taghioff and team of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine screened electronic health records of more than 70 million patients from countries including the US, UK, Germany, Italy, Israel, and Singapore. After this, around 37,377 patients were chosen and clustered up based on the factors like age, gender, ethnicity, smoking, and health issues.
‘People who had not got their flu jabs were up to 20% more likely to seek ICU admission and 58% more likely to visit the Emergency Department because of the illness caused by COVID-19 infection.’
These people were divided into two groups of which people from the first group had got flu jabs between two weeks and six months before being diagnosed with COVID-19 and people from the second group got COVID-19 but not the flu vaccines.
The development of severe covid effects like sepsis, stroke, deep vein thrombosis pulmonary embolism, acute respiratory distress syndrome, heart attack, pneumonia within 120 days of testing positive for COVID-19 was monitored between these two groups. The severity of the disease was also evaluated based on the details of emergency department visits, ICU admission, and death.
Based on the analyses, they found that people who had not got their flu jabs were up to 20% more likely to seek ICU admission and 58% more likely to visit the Emergency Department. They were also up to 40% more likely to develop deep vein thrombosis, 45% more likely to develop sepsis, and 58% more likely to experience stroke.
“Despite this, the influenza vaccine is by no means a replacement for the COVID-19 vaccine, and we advocate for everyone to receive their COVID-19 vaccine if able to. Regardless of the degree of protection afforded by the influenza vaccine against adverse outcomes associated with COVID-19, simply being able to conserve global healthcare resources by keeping the number of influenza cases under control is reason enough to champion continued efforts to promote influenza vaccination,” said Ms.Taghioff
Source: Medindia
