There’s yet another addition to the pandemic that is the “flurona,” but it doesn’t refer to a new variant or even a new condition. The “Flurona” is a term coined to describe the condition of being infected with Covid-19 and the flu simultaneously.The made-up term describes simultaneous infection with both influenza and the virus that causes COVID-19.

The two diseases do not combine to make some hybrid form of either virus, which makes “flurona” a bit of a fear mongering misnomer. However co-infection is becoming more common. The possibility of having COVID-19 and the flu at the same time has been a an issue for some people since the beginning of the pandemic. Flurona was not really being discovered until recently due to increased testing of patients who were experiencing symptoms.  Some effects of Flurona are the following; fever , cough, chills, sore throat, body aches, congestion, vomiting, and diarrhea.

In an article by CNN’s Nadav Davidovitch, director of the School of Public Health at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, Davidovitch stated, “There is now both very high influenza activity and very high Covid activity, there is the option that someone will be infected with both. I don’t think this is going to be a common situation, but that’s something to consider.” Lockdowns and mask wearing helped limit the spread of influenza earlier on in the pandemic, but as society opens up, cases are expected to rise.

Flurona is not a new disease, experts stress, nor is it a new variant of COVID-19. The flu virus and COVID-19 virus are from two very different virus families. Scientists are not concerned about the two viruses mixing to create a new virus. There are many different types of viruses that are capable of infecting people. Viruses that cause the flu and COVID-19 are two examples, but there’s also HIV, the chicken pox virus, rabies virus, the common cold and many others. It has always been possible for one person to be infected with two or more different viruses at once. Also with flu season coinciding with a new COVID-19 surge, there’s a greater chance that a handful of people will test positive for both viruses at the same time.

The study, which is not yet peer reviewed, shows that flurona cases have been happening throughout the pandemic but are so far relatively rare. Out of more than 170,000 recorded cases of COVID-19 seen in hospital data from the Mayo Clinic, just 73 were co-infected with the flu. Alabama and Georgia had the highest percentages of hospitalized COVID-19 patients with influenza co-infections—0.8 percent and 0.7 percent, respectively. These flurona patients were all relatively young, and their illnesses were generally mild. This is everything about the flurona.