by SARAH THOMACK
St. Joseph Post
Health officials anticipate the upcoming flu season occurring during a pandemic will be challenging.
Director of Health for the St. Joseph Health Department Debra Bradley says their biggest concern is that the flu has similar symptoms as COVID-19.
“It’ll be difficult to know what somebody is dealing with, but also, if your body is trying to fight the flu and then if you come in contact with COVID or any other virus, it’s harder for your body to fight it off and so that’s when we may see a higher mortality rate and we don’t want that, we want people to be healthy and we want them to be safe," Bradley tells St. Joseph Post.
Bradley says many of the same precautions we’ve all been taking to slow the spread of COVID should continue during flu season.
“If you feel sick, stay home and don’t go out,” Bradley says. “If you think it’s the flu or not, you can go get tested and hopefully that would help identify what it is you do have and also will set your mode of treatment. Both of them are symptomatic treatment, however, when you know that it’s COVID, you know that there’s some specific steps that are necessary to protect the community from it and a lot of them are the same with flu.”
State and local health officials are encouraging residents to get their flu shot soon. The St. Joseph Health Department will be holding their annual drive-through flu shot clinic starting at 9 a.m. on October 14th at Krug Park.