New Year's Eve gatherings, drinks with the neighbours, and almost three years of catching up to do, it's perhaps no surprise that many of us have been struck down with a mysterious bug that causes a variety of symptoms.
What else could it be that you are consistently testing negative for Covid? Are we more at risk of getting sick this winter, or have we forgotten what life was like before Covid restrictions were put in place?
It has been party season for humans and all sorts of bugs that have spread through respiratory droplets and sloppy kisses under the mistletoe.
There was a 22% increase in hospital admissions in England between the 7 and 14th of December. A lot of people who are vaccine against Covid don't show up on LFTs because they don't have a free test to detect the disease.
It's possible to rule out Covid if you test several times as your illness progresses. Covid may be the first thing that comes to mind when we feel unwell, but it is not the only bug capitalising on the pre- Christmas cocktail of social events.
The chair of the Royal College of GP said that the college had seen a rise in the number of cases of the common cold and flu.
Flu is the biggest problem right now. According to new data, the number of patients in the hospital with flu has risen. An average of 3,746 people with flu were in hospital over a seven day period, up from 2,088 the previous week.
It was a bad flu season in England and Wales, with the highest number of excess winter deaths recorded in more than four decades.
According to Dr Antonia Ho, a consultant in infectious diseases and clinical senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow Centre for Viruses Research, this year's flu season started earlier than last year, and it seems to be tracking a similar kind of trajectory.
Even healthy people can get the flu. It can be a bad cold, but it can also be a bad night sweats, and older people are particularly vulnerable to pneumonia.
One of the dangers of flu is that it can lead to more serious infections. A lot of the group A strep infections that are currently circulating in children is related to the respiratory virus.
After the flu season in the UK, there was a higher number of infections.
Current data shows that the main strain of flu in the UK is H3N2, which is associated with more severe disease in vulnerable groups. When most circulating flu viruses are well matched to the vaccine strains, the risk of flu illness is reduced by between 40% and 60%.
The seasonal flu vaccine has been given to people of all ages, but less than a third of two- to three-year-olds have received it. About 650 children under the age of five are in hospital with flu in England.
The otherviruses that can cause flu-like symptoms are not the only ones. Although babies and young children are at greater risk of hospitalisation and death due to respiratory syncytial virus, it can also cause symptoms such as a bad cough in adults.
There was a big peak of rhinoviruses a long time ago. It's hard to define which respiratory virus you have because everyone responds different to it.
Most of the Viruses peak during winter as they replicate faster and stay infectious for longer. When we spend a lot of time indoors, we are exposed to more airborne viruses, which makes it easier for us to get sick from them.
Their usual patterns seem to have been disrupted by two years of barely being exposed to such bugs. A lot of people get infections each year due to immunity from past exposure and a fresh group of young children. If these seasonal waves are suppressed, the number of susceptible individuals in a population will increase, particularly if vaccine usage is low.
Now that people are mixing more, wearing masks less and paying less attention to hand hygiene, it's a good time to pass infections on.
It doesn't mean that we should try to get infections with these types of Viruses. The fact that some kids are going to encounter a lot of bugs is not a bad thing. A lot of children under the age of one have breathing problems. The fact that they won't have encountered it during their first year of life is a good thing because they will have a more mature immune system that's better able to deal with it.
Some people may be exposed to more than one disease at the same time, which is a further problem. According to a study published in the Lancet earlier this year, hospital patients who tested positive for srs-cov-2 and flu were more likely to need mechanical ventilation or die than those who only had Covid. The risk of death was higher for patients who were co-infecting with both adenoviruses and sars-coV-2.
The respiratory viruses appear to be peaking at the same time, which could lead to more co-infections. In a normal year, the flu would occur around Christmas or just after, and the respiratory syncytial virus would peak before Christmas. A lot of things are not the same as they were before.
The good news is that many of these illnesses are preventable, through good public hygiene such as regular hand washing, throwing tissues away once they've been used, and staying away from other people if you're unwell.
Hawthorne said that vulnerable patients such as elderly patients, those with underlying health conditions, and young children need to come forward to receive their flu vaccinations and Covid-19 boosters when they are invited for them. It's not too late to get the vaccine against the winter viruses.
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