Tips for Staying Healthy and Well this Flu Season

by Lily Parish | Oct 15, 2019

Remedy is an urgent care provider out of Austin, TX. They generously shared their top tips for staying healthy this flu season. If you’re in the Austin area and need urgent care, give them a call! They do house calls and they are cash pay friendly. 

As the days get shorter, football season is upon us, and Halloween seems to have gotten even bigger, we find ourselves plunged into fall. And with these latter months of the year, we also enter into a much less fun ritual, the advent of the dreaded “flu season”. 

One question we get a lot here at Remedy is, “How do I avoid the flu?”  So, here briefly are three ways.

1. Get the flu shot

This seems like a no-brainer.  But it’s estimated that only about 37% of adults in the US get their flu shot. We understand. It can be a hassle to take time off to go to the clinic and get it. But it is so important at protecting you from the flu.  

Some years (like this one), it will be reported that the flu shot isn’t expected to be as effective as in years past. Why does this happen? Well, there are two “types” of seasonal flu virus – A & B.  Those are further divided into “strains” – of which there are hundreds. The flu vaccine combines three or four of the strains based on what is being observed globally as the dominant strains.  But sometimes a wild card strain predominates that is not covered in the shot.

Even so, health professionals recommend that you get the shot because there is good evidence that even if you “still get the flu”, the shot confers some immunity that can make your illness milder.  Also, the more people who are vaccinated, the population develops something we call “herd immunity” which helps halt the transmission of the diseases among us.

2. Stay home if you are sick

If you have the flu, by all means, do not go to work. You don’t have to “sick shame” them, but if someone comes to your office with a fever and hacking cough, send them home! The flu virus is transmitted in aerosolized secretions – which is a scientific way of saying the mucus that gets sprayed into the air when the sick person coughs and sneezes. There is a zone of about six feet around a sick person that the virus can travel in these particles and land in your mouth, nose, or even inhaled into your lungs.  Then, boom, you’ve got the flu.

The period of infectivity is as long as five to seven days from the onset of symptoms.  So make sure that sick colleagues are staying at home as long as they need to. 

3. Wash your hands often or use hand sanitizer

Just know that this time of year the flu virus is lurking on surfaces everywhere.  So wash your hands often! Public touch screens are notorious for harboring germs like the flu virus.  The virus can live for as long as 24 hours on a surface and outside a human host. That means if someone with the flu touched a screen that you then touch, you could very likely pick up those unwanted flu virions. (Yes, that’s a real word. And a pretty cool one at that.) 

https://sedera.com/tips-for-staying-healthy-and-well-this-flu-season/