Health experts urge parents to vaccinate their children against flu, as cases rise around the country and the risks of ‘flurona’ increase.
As Australian states face an early start to the flu season, GPs are preparing for the unprecedented challenges that come with the uptick in influenza and covid in the community.
One of the biggest concerns is the potential for patients to contract both viruses at the same time – a phenomenon that has been labelled “flurona”.
“Worryingly, some people can have both viruses at the same time, or one after the other,” said Dr Nirvana Luckraj, chief medical officer at Healthdirect, warning that the elderly and unvaccinated were most vulnerable.
“We haven’t experienced a typical flu season for the past two years because most of the country was in lockdown and being diligent with preventive behaviours that minimise the spread of viruses in the community,” she said.
But earlier this month in Victoria, a woman in her 90s died from the double dose of covid and influenza, and covid cases are rising once again in the state. More than 14,000 new cases of covid were recorded on 17 May.
As of 18 May, there were 381,000 active covid cases across the nation. Meanwhile, surveillance data has shown there have been almost 11,000 influenza cases this year already, and around 7200 of these were diagnosed in the past fortnight. That’s three times higher than the previous fortnight.
In NSW, flu cases have been rising for several weeks across the state.
NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant said there were 2000 new flu cases notified in NSW in the week ending 7 May, compared with 1000 cases in the previous week, as well as around 60 emergency department presentations for flu-like illness that required an admission to hospital.
“Alongside the increase in flu cases, we are seeing more people with flu presenting to and being admitted to hospital, including among young children,” Dr Chant said.
“This can be very serious, especially for young children who have had little to no exposure to flu over the last two years,” she said. “We strongly encourage parents of children aged between six months and five years old to get them vaccinated without delay.”
The use of covid antivirals was a hot topic at a recent Department of Health’s Winter Preparedness webinar for GPs. AMA vice-president Dr Chris Moy said one of the major problems with prescribing antivirals was getting a positive result, meeting the criteria, and then getting access to the medications within the five-day window required for the drugs to have an effect.
“We’ve got a five-day time limit and that’s the problem and getting it done is a big issue at the moment because the hit rate is not tremendous,” he said.
Dr Moy said it was important for state and primary care systems to get better at delivering these antivirals in time, especially because this problem was likely to be ongoing.
“It is a big responsibility, but the problem is it can have a huge influence on whether somebody ends up in hospital or potentially ends up in really serious trouble with covid.
Dr Moy also warned that GPs were likely to be “pressured to prescribe privately”, revealing he had already experienced it.
“We do need to try to hold to the guidelines … especially when we’ve got a lack of them (the antivirals, including Molnupiravir and Paxlovid). We really do need to not make this a free for all at this stage because we do need to treat the ones that need it the most.”
Dr Moy told The Medical Republic there was increasing pressure from patients to privately prescribe covid antivirals, even though each course of treatment costs about $1000.
He said he had also had patients asking why they could not have access to the antivirals even though they did not meet the strict criteria, because they believed they had “done all the right things” in following public health orders and vaccination advice.
“I’ve just had to explain the situation,” he said. “Later it will be different when there are a lot of these medications and they are available, but then they may not be subsidised.”
In anticipation of a rough flu season for Australia’s elderly population, the DoH is sending stocks of Tamiflu to all residential aged care facilities in Australia to protect this already vulnerable section of the community.
Chris Jeacle, assistant secretary at the DOH’s Ageing and Aged Care Group, told the webinar that residential aged care facilities were encouraged to pre-assess residents for Tamiflu suitability and seek resident or family consent ahead of a flu outbreak. Tamiflu must be administered within 48 hours of the onset of symptoms to be effective.
“This will be a one-off deployment to facilities and the pre-placement of supplies is not intended to replace standard supply chains that are usually utilised by providers; rather it’s to reduce the impacts of supply shortages within the private market and the delays in shipping that may result from increased demand during the winter period,” she said.
A DoH spokeswoman said all residential aged care facilities would receive an allocation of Tamiflu that will be sent directly to facilities providing there are no regulatory barriers to receiving or storing these medications on site.?State and territory health departments were involved in the deployment arrangements, the spokeswoman said.
“Each residential aged care facility will receive an allocation based on their resident population utilising the available stock in the National Medical Stockpile,” she said.
