Could flu really kill 30,000 people in Britain this year as our immune systems, rendered naïve after two years of lockdowns and other anti-Covid measures, are over-ridden by the virus? That suggestion has been reported in places this morning.

There has certainly been a sharp increase in people reporting flu symptoms over the past couple of weeks, as shown up in the various metrics used by the UK Health Security Agency. For the first time since the beginning of the pandemic there are now more people being admitted for flu – at 6.8 per 100,000 in the week to 11 December – than are being admitted for Covid (6.6 per 100,000).

To reach 30,000 deaths from flu alone would take something of a calamity

Yet to reach 30,000 deaths from flu alone would take something of a calamity. It turns out that the 30,000 figure being touted derives from a figure provided by a charity, the Health Foundation, for the number of deaths from influenza and pneumonia experienced in Britain in a bad year, like 2017/18.

The complication is that published statistics for flu deaths tend to combine flu with pneumonia – the latter of which tends to carry off large numbers of people who are on the point of death from other conditions. A freedom of information request put to the Office for National Statistics last year reveals just how much this inflates the apparent role of flu. Of the 29,516 deaths recorded from influenza and pneumonia in 2018, just 1,596 were from flu alone.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that we couldn’t have a far worse flu season than in 2018, following two years in which few Britons have been exposed to the disease. But the Australian experience is reassuring. Earlier this year, Australia was reporting a particularly bad flu season as the country awakened from repeated lockdowns. Yet the flu epidemic died down as quickly as it began – far earlier in the season than normal. In June, flu notifications were running at 30,000 a week, yet by the end of July that had fallen to 5,000. The flu season in Australia does not normally peak until August.

One factor in Australia, as in Britain, is that more people are now being given flu shots. In Britain, it used to be only the over-65s, plus younger people who had other conditions which made them vulnerable to respiratory infections, who were invited for flu jabs. Now, everyone over 50 has been invited, and in many cases have been administered with a flu jab at the same time as their Covid booster. That may become a pattern in coming years, with annual Covid and flu jabs becoming a fixture. If so, one of the legacies of the pandemic could end up being less flu as well, so that we see generally fewer deaths and inflections compared to before the pandemic.

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