Influenza lineage extinction during the COVID-19 pandemic?

One flu virus lineage was possibly eradicated during Covid pandemic https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00642-4 Everyone I know with kids has a wave of various mild cold/flu cases after we re-opened after the Covid pandemic. But after that initial wave last spring I don’t think I’ve been sick at all. I’m going to guess that these viruses will come back in waves, that will kind off ebb and flow for while until there’s a new stable equilibrium, where we’re back to maybe having a cold once or twice a year (that was the norm for me at least), and you’ve just been lucky not to be hit by one yet.

How do masks work on the flu virus but not on COVID https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00642-4 It sounds like you have been dealing with a lot of ineffective health theater. That is unfortunate. But that's a very different thing from "cloth/surgical masks are largely ineffective".

The world had essentially no influenza season, 2020. This isn't just the US, it was everywhere. Some strain(s) may have gone extinct: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00642-4 Let's see, masks work against rhinovirus, influenza virus, and they magically don't work for (also respiratory) COVID? Doubt it. What possible evidence do you have for this "all had COVID" assertion? The biggest estimate I could find was 140 million in the USA: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/02/28/covid-cases...

Wow, webmd made it really hard to find the primary source for that. To be clear, they are attributing this drop off of this flu strain to be likely due to pandemic mitigation efforts, as well as maybe lucky timing and some specifics of how this strain spreads Since it doesn’t seem plausible to repeat the wide scale pandemic mitigation controls any time soon, I doubt we can keep wiping out flu strains, but we could certainly reduce the damage the flu does if we want to https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00642-4