Ministers have been urged to look into vaccinating all age groups against the flu to avoid a winter double whammy if a second coronavirus wave hits.
The recommendations were made by advisers after a SAGE meeting in April, with Public Health England estimating on average in the last five years 17,000 people have died annually in England of flu, according to The Sun.
However, the yearly deaths vary widely from a high of 28,330 in 2014/15 to a low of 1,692 in 2018/19.
Winter flu also puts major strain on the availability of NHS hospital beds, taking up an estimated 50,000.
As it stands, less than half of England is eligible for the free jab, with chief medical adviser Professor Chris Whitty admitting the similarity in symptoms would make things very difficult.
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“At this point in the year if someone’s got something that looks like Covid there’s a high chance it is Covid. In the winter, that is less true,” he said.
And while flu all but vanished in Europe last month as coronavirus lockdowns slowed transmission, according to EU data and scientists - but have had less flu samples available to ready vaccines for next year.
The northern hemisphere’s winter flu outbreak normally runs from October until mid-May and in some seasons has claimed lives on the scale of COVID-19, despite the existence of a vaccine.
Influenza killed 152,000 people in Europe in the 2017-18 winter.
“The flu season ended earlier than usual this year and this is probably due to the measures taken regarding SARS-CoV-2, such as social distancing and mask wearing,” Holger Rabenau, virologist at the Frankfurt University Hospital, told Reuters, using the scientific name of the new coronavirus.
But laboratories have been so overwhelmed with COVID-19 and have had fewer flu samples at their disposal, meaning they “may not have the full picture of the virus circulating in the last part of the season,” said Pasi Penttinen, a senior flu expert at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).
Fewer data and delays in processing information could affect the quality of the vaccine for the 2021 winter season in the southern hemisphere, whose composition is usually decided in September based on samples collected at the start of the year.
“It might be a problem,” Penttinen said, as less information on the possible mutations of this year’s virus lowers the chances of assembling the most effective jab against strains expected to be prevalent the following year.
The problem is unlikely to affect next winter’s vaccine for the northern hemisphere because its composition was agreed in February, Penttinen said.
Decisions over the composition of vaccines are taken early because it takes several months to manufacture the millions of flu jabs needed every year.
