While "flurona" may not sound like a genuine thing, it is, according to health professionals both nationally and internationally.
The Times of Israel has reported that Israel confirmed its first case of flurona in December. The dual infection was discovered in an unvaccinated pregnant woman with minimal symptoms, specialists at Beilinson Hospital revealed.
Despite its name, flurona is not a literal fusion of COVID-19 and the flu that has merged to become some super virus that could mark the end of our species.
Rather, flurona is simply a word for having both COVID-19 and the flu at the same time. Not only is it not a new sickness, but it is also not a new phenomenon.
Despite earlier claims that a woman was found to have both the flu and COVID-19, this was not figurative flurona patient zero.
Flurona has been present for at least two years, albeit it wasn't called that at the time.
The Atlantic reported on a case from February 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, in November 2021. A man had entered a medical center in Queens at the time and was originally diagnosed with the flu. He was tested again and found to be positive for COVID-19 by early March.
This father, with his wife and two children, were among the first flurona cases, way back at the start of the pandemic.
They weren't even the first cases to emerge. No, those could just be from a study published in China in early 2020 that found numerous occurrences of flu and coronavirus infection occurring at the same time.
It isn't simply restricted to these two locations, either.
Flurona cases had already been identified in the U.S, Brazil, Hungary, the Philippines, and even Israel before this latest research helped coin the term, The Washington Post reported.
What are the symptoms of flurona?
Flurona is suffering from both the flu and COVID-19 at the same time, thus the symptoms are similar. There are other parallels as well. According to the World Health Organization, the new coronavirus and the flu spread in very similar ways, such as through the respiratory system.
The at-risk populations are also largely the same, including frontline medical personnel, the elderly, those with underlying diseases, and pregnant women. However, this does not imply that everything is same.
Some people who catch flurona have more severe symptoms than others, and the explanation for this is largely due to vaccinations.
"If you are vaccinated, the disease is very mild," Rabin Medical Center-Beilinson Campus gynecology director Arnon Vizhnitser told The Washington Post.
Because vaccines are available for both COVID-19 and the flu, getting vaccinated - and, in the case of COVID-19, getting a booster shot - is the best strategy to prevent flurona.
