I keep getting niggled when I hear 'interviewees' on the Public Health Infomercials dropping in the idea that 'of course we had zero flu cases' last year so we expect there to be a lack of immunity. Recently I either read or heard, possibly in an infomercial out of Wales that there had been 'zero lab-confirmed cases of flu'. This was the first time I had heard this said in this way.
At the beginning of my sceptical journey I read a document on the government web pages that if I recall was a guidance document for laboratories during the pandemic. It either advised or perhaps required labs not to accept or process samples for Influenza testing. I haven't been able to find it recently despite searching.
Can anyone point me to any published statistics on the number of samples that were actually tested for influenza in the winter of 2020 and the numbers that were positive, negative or perhaps void?
My interest is obviously that if there were zero cases of lab-confirmed influenza, this could either indicate that no influenza was detected in X samples or that no samples were tested. Either way, zero flu.
Anyone point me in the right direction or rescue me from a badly misunderstood statistical rabbit trail?