Tracking COVID-19 through symptom monitoring will be harder when flu season starts

As flu season picks up over the next few months, it’s going to get harder for public health officials to rely on trends in the number of people with coughs and fevers to monitor the COVD-19 pandemic. Starting next month, people coming into the emergency room with flu-like symptoms could just have the flu.

“The symptoms overlap,” says Edward Belongia, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute in Wisconsin. Experts will have to lean on other methods, like lab testing, to distinguish COVID-19 from influenza.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) tracks illnesses that look like the flu (referred to as influenza-like illness) through a network of thousands of healthcare providers around...

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