Coupling between COVID-19 and seasonal influenza leads to synchronization of their dynamics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a coupled model of COVID-19 and seasonal influenza, revealing that their interaction synchronizes their outbreaks and significantly shortens influenza's duration.

Contribution

It presents a novel coupled dynamical model capturing cooperation, competition, and asymmetry between COVID-19 and influenza, highlighting their synchronized behavior.

Findings

Coupling synchronizes COVID-19 and influenza outbreaks.

Influenza's duration is reduced by half due to interaction.

The model captures complex pathogen interactions.

Abstract

Interactions between COVID-19 and other pathogens may change their dynamics. Specifically, this may hinder the modelling of empirical data when the symptoms of both infections are hard to distinguish. We introduce a model coupling the dynamics of COVID-19 and seasonal influenza, simulating cooperation, competition and asymmetric interactions. We find that the coupling synchronizes both infections, with a strong influence on the dynamics of influenza, reducing its time extent to a half.