An unvaccinated, pregnant Israeli woman has the dubious distinction of having contracted the country’s first case of “flurona” – a simultaneous infection with COVID-19 and the seasonal flu, reports say.
The unidentified woman was diagnosed with the dreaded double infection when she arrived last week at the Rabin Medical Centre in Petah Tikva, ten kilometres east of Tel Aviv, the Times of Israel said.
Reports of people being hit with the rare combination of the two illnesses first surfaced in the United States in the spring of 2020, the newspaper said.
Despite the worrying diagnosis, the Israeli mother reportedly experienced only mild symptoms of each.
Similar symptoms
The daily Hebrew-language Hamodia newspaper reported Arnon Vizhnitser, the director of the hospital’s gynaecology department, as saying: “She was diagnosed with the flu and coronavirus as soon as she arrived.
“Both tests came back positive, even after we checked again,” he said, adding that, “The disease is the same disease. They’re viral and cause difficulty breathing since both attack the upper respiratory tract.”
The woman was released from the hospital on Thursday and was said to be in good condition, the Times of Israel reported.
The Israeli Health Ministry was studying her condition, amid a worrying rise in flu cases, to see whether a combination of the two bugs can causes more severe illness.
“Last year, we did not witness flu cases among pregnant or birthing women,” Vizhnitser said, according to Hamodia. “Today, we are seeing cases of both coronavirus and the flu that are starting to rear their head.”
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced on Sunday that Israel would offer a fourth dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to people over the age of 60 and health-care workers to counter the surge in Omicron-variant cases.
Last week, the country approved a second booster of the Pfizer/BioNTech jab for people who are immunocompromised and for the elderly living in care homes.
“We now have a new layer of defence,” said Prime Minister Bennett in a televised news conference reported by Reuters. “Israel will once again be pioneering the global vaccination effort.”
Israeli officials reported 4,206 new COVID-19 infections over the past 24 hours and a 195% spike over the past week, according to Agence France-Presse.
Bennett urged all adults and children to get vaccinated, warning that cases could reach roughly “50,000 cases per day soon”.
More than four million out of the 9.2 million people living in Israel have received three shots of the vaccine. In total, almost 1.4 million cases of COVID-19 – including 8,244 deaths – have been recorded in the country.
“The [infection] numbers will have to be very high in order to reach herd immunity,” the chief at the Ministry of Health, Nachman Ash, told 103FM Radio.
“This is possible, but we don’t want to reach it by means of infections: we want it to happen as a result of many people vaccinating,” he said.
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