Tourists visit the Yellow Crane Tower in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province Photo: Xinhua

Wuhan hospitals didn't admit a single patient suffering from H1N1 from February to June, local media reported, a result doctors said was due to good health habits Wuhan people cultivated during COVID-19 epidemic like wearing masks and washing hands.

Huang Chaolin, director of the Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, told Hubei Daily on Sunday that  the hospital usually admitted 3,000 to 4,000 patients sickened by H1N1 between February and June in previous years. The report said all H1N1 flu patients in Wuhan are cared for by the Jinyintan hospital. 

The incidence of acute infectious diseases among children is also lower this year, according to Huang. 

Lü Mengtao, operations director of Beijing Zhimed Medical Science, told the Global Times on Monday that the COVID-19 epidemic forced the public to pay more attention to wearing masks and washing hands, which they now know can curb the transmission of infectious diseases.

Fewer people gathering in groups also helps prevent virus transmission, Lü noted.

Use of drugs for these diseases also declined. Guo Hongrong, director of the pneumology department of the Wuhan No.3 Hospital, told Hubei Daily that the hospital prescribed 40 percent fewer inflammatory and allergy drugs compared to the same period last year. 

A Wuhan pharmaceutical wholesale enterprise told the Hubei Daily that the sale of medicines for cough, cold and respiratory infections also showed a 40 percent year-on-year decline. 

During the epidemic, hospitals enhanced treatment and many applied an appointment system that limited the number of people going to the hospitals per day, Lü said, noting that many doctors told him that the number of patients they treated in the first half of 2020 was only 50 percent of that in the same period of 2019, and drug prescriptions declined accordingly. 

Many netizens across the country also took to social media platforms saying that they are witnessing fewer people catching the flu or cold and fewer children getting hand-foot-and-mouth disease this year. 

Some private clinics for children said on China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo that they have had to adjust their business model to include dental and surgery services to offset the impact of fewer sickly patients.

A mother of a five-year-old girl in Beijing surnamed Zhang told the Global Times on Monday that her daughter went to the hospital once a month in 2019, but this year neither her daughter nor her parents have been sick. 

"I think it is because they wear masks, and I will ask them to keep the habit," Zhang said.