> I think respiratory flu is far less common now than it was. I have had a legit case of the flu only once in my adult life. After spending 15 years teaching in a public school, I had countless colds but never caught the flu.

They’re not far less common in average. Rates have gone down a bit with the annual flu shot, but there’s a few things going on.

-Flu rates vary wildly by year and decade. There were a few big pandemics where a very large percentage of people got the flu.

-There was no way to easily test for the flu, so people said they had it more frequently than they did.

In a given year about 12% of kids will come down with symptomatic influence which is not too far off from what we can estimate that historic numbers were in an average year.

>Strep

I looked up studies on this. Nothing conclusive, but likely no large change.

Recommendations about when to test have changed though because it turns out that if you culture every kid with a runny nose a large percentage of them will come back positive even though their symptoms are viral.

So you’re probably right that you notice fewer diagnosed strep cases, but there aren’t actually fewer symptomatic cases.