"If the pandemic hits" ... the virus has already hit.
The WHO itself has backed off the Pandemic classification [1].
The virus has an overall 98% survival rate, and most diagnosed cases in the US, are not actually showing any symptoms (which itself is a cause for concern re: spread).
The annual Flu, MERS and SARS were far far worse. The flu kills between 26,000 and 52,000 annually in the US [2], and as much as I love prepping, this just does not fit the bill for the amount of FUD it has generated.
edit: comments are making me re-think my position. COVID is far worse mortality rate wise in 65+ patients vs flu.
I don't mean to suggest that this won't be worse than the flu when all is done, but you're comparing global COVID-19 deaths to US-only flu deaths (US COVID deaths are about 3,000 right now, not 37,000).
I disagree. It's simply too early to make that determination.
The Spanish Flu had a estimated infection fatality ratio of >2.5% (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/12/1/05-0979_article). As another commenter pointed out, the COVID-19 IFR is 0.9% in NYC. The difference between 2.5% and 0.9% is only 2.8x. However the IFR is not only underestimated due to the lag between case detection and death, but it's also probably a lot worse in many other parts of the world (third world countries, etc). So it's possible the difference is only 2-fold, which would make both pandemics relatively comparable.
> "If you study the numbers in 2017 and 2018, we had 50 to 60 million with the flu," Erickson said. "And we had a similar death rate in the deaths the United States were 43,545"
For comparison, 1 million Americans (50x less) have had covid, and so far 59,225 have died (1.4x more) [0]. Their conclusion is that this is no worse than the flu, even though those numbers show it being more than 60x more deadly.
edit: Bringing this up from lower discussion: Even if you assume 10x more cases than reported, with 2x observed excess deaths [1], that's 10 million people sick and 100,000 dead; 5x less people sick and 2.5x more people dead than the flu.
For example: Why was H1N1 allowed to spread around the world more or less unchecked, while countries are going to far greater lengths to try to halt Covid-19? Why did the WHO call H1N1 a pandemic but not Covid-19? Isn’t 12,469 deaths a lot worse than the 26 that have been attributed to Covid-19 in the U.S. so far?
That last one is the simplest to answer: Covid-19 is near the beginning of its spread in the U.S., and thus cannot be compared with H1N1’s effect over a full year. If the U.S. death toll from Covid-19 is only 12,469 a year from now, that will likely be counted as a great success. The legitimate worry is that it could be many, many times higher, because Covid-19 is so much deadlier for those who get it than the 2009 H1N1 influenza was.
How much deadlier is still unknown, but of the cases reported to the WHO so far 3.4% have resulted in fatalities. That’s probably misleadingly high because there are so many unreported cases, and in South Korea, which has done the best job of keeping up with the spread of the virus through testing, the fatality rate so far is about 0.7%. But even that is 35 times worse than H1N1 in 2009 and 2010. Multiply 12,469 by 35 and you get 436,415 — which would amount to the biggest U.S. infectious-disease death toll since the 1918 flu. Hospitalization rates are also many times higher for Covid-19, meaning that if it spread as widely as H1N1 it would overwhelm the U.S. health-care system.
That’s one very important reason governments (and stock markets) around the world have reacted so much more strongly to Covid-19 than to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. Another reason is somewhat more hope-inspiring. It’s that public health experts generally don’t think influenza can be controlled once it starts spreading, other than with a vaccine, whereas several Asian countries seem to have successfully turned back the coronavirus tide, for now at least.
Influenza can’t be controlled because as much as half the transmission of the disease occurs before symptoms appear. With Covid-19 that proportion seems to be lower, meaning that even though it’s more contagious than influenza once symptoms appear, it may be possible to control by testing widely and quickly isolating those who have the disease.
This is misinformation pulling on the heartstrings of the non-logical. Most people who caught covid would have died if they caught the normal flu...like every other year.
Also, wasn't it convenient of them to leave "covid" out of the headline. Expected deaths this year without a pandemic were already expected to be much higher.[1]
FYI if you downvote without refuting my statements, you are that non-logical person.
Well, the flu only used to kill like 34k people a year in the US. Covid killed over 10 times more, in a population where a significant portion of it was doing social isolation, wearing masks, etc. So yes, maybe you can call flu a pandemic, but don't compare it to Covid after everything the world as seen in the past year.
> I just hate these blogs saying this virus is akin to the the flu
Author here. That's a mischaracterization of what I said. But yes it is true that overall mortality is similar to the flu. I settled on COVID-19 being 3x as deadly, but that figure is up to debate.
The important thing to understand is the varying risk profiles. The flu kills the very young and very old, whereas COVID-19 primarily kills the very old.
> Does the flu leave bodies in trucks, apartments, and bagged on the streets?
Yes, pandemic flu absolutely does.
> Does the flu kill dozens of workers in meat processing plants every year
Yup. Pandemic flu absolutely would.
> Does the flu take more than ten years of life from the average person it kills?
Could you clarify this point? I don't quite understand what you're saying. The flu takes away more wellbeing-years per death because it kills infants and young children whereas COVID-19 almost never does.
Without containment, COVID-19 will directly kill at least 10x more people in the US this year. Worse, it will overwhelm hospitals and suffocate medical supply chains, resulting in more indirect deaths as well. You're comparing the deaths of multiple already pandemic flus to a single disease which has not yet spread throughout the United States.
Right. But COVID-19 isn't influenza related so all these flu comparisons are moot as far as I'm concerned. The mortality appears for now - with all the figures that I've seen - to be much higher.
If this thing keeps going like it has for the last couple of weeks then it will make the last H1N1 pandemic look like a walk in the park. The final count on that was 100's of thousands dead in 199 different countries. And it didn't take off nearly as fast as this.
> Up till now (~ 2 years), 56395 Americans less than 50yo have died from Covid
In the worst flu year in the last decade, the 95% confidence interval for total (all ages) flu deaths is 44k-64k and the flu also skews older for deaths, with around 75% in the over 50 category.
56k in 2 years under 50 is much worse than the flu in that age group.
1. The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus currently appears to have a death rate 7 to 20 times higher than typical seasonal flus, and the death rate gets worse without medical care (and later in the illness).
2. Nobody has any existing antibodies against the coronavirus, so it can infect more people than a seasonal flu.
We have seen in China and Italy that this virus can push health care systems to the point of collapse. And Italy can expect to see 3x the current patient load even if their shutdown has mostly stopped the virus.
Estimates from the CDC say that the US risks up to 1.7 million dead if we don't slow the spread of the disease. Other estimates suggest closer to 480,000 dead unless we take measures. That's out of 325 million, so yes, most people would survive.
The good news is that this isn't the zombie apocalypse or (for Steven King fans) Captain Trips. But unless everyone is missing something important in the numbers, this could be closr to 1918.
Exponential growth (or even sigmoid curves) can be nasty.
Not sure if it makes sense worldwide given that there are a lot of 3rd world countries, but in US the flu has a mortality rate 2 orders of magnitude less than covid-19.
The facts presented do not support the conclusion because COVID-19 is not the flu. This is the logic I see in the post:
1. COVID-19 has not killed more people than the flu in the US so far
2. Therefore COVID-19 is comparable to the flu
3. We have not responded so seriously to the flu in the past as we are to this new virus
4. Therefore... people are messed up, I'm shocked
I'm pointing out that [1] does not imply [2] for the very basic reason that the situation is still unfolding. I think you even recognize this ("This isn't to say COVID-19 isn't bad, or doesn't have the potential to become worse"), so I'm wondering why you would pin your conclusion on COVID-19 being comparable to the flu.
"If the pandemic hits" ... the virus has already hit.
The WHO itself has backed off the Pandemic classification [1].
The virus has an overall 98% survival rate, and most diagnosed cases in the US, are not actually showing any symptoms (which itself is a cause for concern re: spread).
The annual Flu, MERS and SARS were far far worse. The flu kills between 26,000 and 52,000 annually in the US [2], and as much as I love prepping, this just does not fit the bill for the amount of FUD it has generated.
edit: comments are making me re-think my position. COVID is far worse mortality rate wise in 65+ patients vs flu.
1 - https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/who-tries-to-calm-ta...
2 - https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html
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