Alright. You’ve enjoyed the aesthetics of the cold months long enough. Time to pack up the cutesy cozy bullshit and get down to brass tacks: this flu season is going to suck. That news comes to us from researchers studying the early flu data, though they didn’t quite say it that way.

Speaking to NPR, Richard Webby of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital says signs are pointing to a “big season.” And the first warning flare didn’t even go up here in the US. It came from the Southern Hemisphere, which acts as a kind of meteorological canary in the coal mine since, if you remember your basic Earth science, it was experiencing winter while we in the Northern Hemisphere were enjoying our sweaty summer. Down there, flu activity saw a major spike that lingered for a long time.

Now the United K

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