There are 2 things happening at once that seem to be causing a rift in online discussions:
1. It seems like people are severely underrating the flu and always have been. Remember when we closed all restaurants and bars and suspended all sports events when the flu killed an estimated 1 million people in 1968-1969? No you don’t because society seemed to have shrugged that one off. Ditto for many years when the flu kills upwards of 600k worldwide [1]
2. The reported CFR (Case Fatality Rates) across different countries is all over the place causing a lot of panic and overstated mortality rates. Countries like Italy report almost 7% whereas in Germany and South Korea, the CFR makes Covid-19 look like no big deal (Closer to 0.1%). I suspect that’s because Italy is well under counting the true denominator, while countries like SK have tested thousands of people per day making their data much more comprehensive.
There’s something unique about this year’s outbreak that seems to resonate deeply with more people. Ultimately it’s definitely not “just the flu” but it’s closer to that then a guaranteed death sentence.
We may see more damage from the secondary effects (people losing jobs, runs on medicine and supplies causing people to die) than from the virus itself.
A pneumonia death as just far more spectacular than a normal flu death. Look at the Italy numbers eg. with about 18.000 COVID-19 deaths this season, which is much lower than a typical flu season of about 25.000. Or look at a bad flu year like 2014 with 54.000 flu deaths. With an IFR of 1%.
That's far higher than with this Corona virus. The COVID-19 IFR is below 1%. So what do we wreck our economy for? Flatten the curve, OK. But not much more than for 5 weeks.
What's really happening is that some people are trying to compare deaths from Covid-19 to deaths from the typical flu/pneumonia season. Nitpicking about what is or isn't the flu really doesn't matter, what matters (to me at least) is how many more deaths Covid-19 is causing than normal "flu/common cold/pneumonia/whatever" deaths which happen every year.
Wow, it is interesting how the censorship in HN grows over time. Looks like Reddit again.
You can not write pretty mundane things without being downvoted.
The flu kills a lot of people(thousands in my country) every year. When last year I had the reported problems the doctors were not surprised, it was normal for them.
Being downvoted for saying that?
I am not implying that covid is not dangerous for lots of people(because I experience it weakly), but that normal flu is dangerous too, specially for old people.
People love catastrophe and ignore larger problems all the time. During the 2017-2018 flu season, almost a million people were hospitalized and ~80,000 people died from the disease (1), a record high and a huge burdon on healthcare for everyone sick or not, yet we aren't getting 2-3 threads a day on influenza popping up on HN like we are with these 150 or so tragic deaths. Maybe part of it is who died. In the case of this flight, it was people affluent enough to afford jet travel. The news is filled with stories of their lives cut short and the tragedy of it all. In the case of deaths from the flu, it is often the old and those in poor health like the homeless who die from the disease, an invisible population for most people. We wont be seeing any articles in national news documenting the lives of those 80,000.
There's also the issue that while it's deadlier than the flu, it's not that much deadlier, so people are genuinely looking at death rates and making different value judgements on if various restrictions are worth it.
The point: Comparing annual flu deaths when we don't shut down the whole world to COVID-19 deaths when we do (especially to make the claim they're similarly dangerous) is insane.
If 100 people drown in lakes, that's not really odd. If 100 people drown in the middle of the Sahara a thousand miles from the nearest water, that's weird.
1. It is both more contagious and lethal than flu. There were estimates that 40% to 70% of the world population will eventually get infected. Depending on how the world responds to this - millions might die.
2. This isn't flu. The same amount of people will die from flu this year as last year. COVID-19 deaths are additional deaths on top of that. Saying that we shouldn't worry about it because every year many of people die of flu, is like saying that we shouldn't make a big deal of the 2004 Indian tsunami because many people die of drowning anyway.
CDC estimates 35K US deaths from the flu last year. Most people got the flu in some form or another.
We’re more than triple the number of deaths from Covid, and we just don’t know who’s gotten it and who hasn’t yet.
It has a wide range of effects, most seem to not know it happened, a few are killed quickly, and in between a bunch are debilitated for a couple of weeks. I haven’t noticed having it, I know people who have. Extended family has died from it.
The transmissibility and the wide range of responses confounds everyone who can only handle simple rules about what to think and do.
I agree that many of the published stats are not that useful, and the sledgehammer shutdowns needed to be careful fine-grained tracking and harm control. None of the points above relate to the narrative, though, but rather to bits and pieces of stuff.
We, supposedly the richest nation on earth, cannot get our act together to test effectively or treat effectively. Lockdown damage, ineffective travel bans at the beginning (ban travel, but with tons of sentimental exceptions? No ban at all, really) is self-inflicted harm.
The flu is community spread, and not possible to contain. There are many strains, and immunity to the previous season's flu does not provide immunity to this one.
The new virus can be contained, at least could have been though perhaps it's too late for that. The only thing keeping the deaths so low to this point has been the containment efforts.
The flu does not overrun an entire country's hospital system like COVID-19 has done to Italy.
It is misinformation to blindly compare total deaths between two diseases like you are.
I think people forgets that if the ordinary flu would have caused this outbreak the counter measurements would probably be the same. But now it’s too late and too complex to stop it. Having two such viruses would probably very problematic and expensive. And which I believe many who compares this to the flu, forgets that we don’t know what this virus does and can cause. A person that had their lungs destroyed because, if true, the coronavirus still will have a miserable life than just dying. Assuming that the death rate is 1% there perhaps be 10% who will have major issues after an infection. That’s not dying but still bad enough.
I think the death rate in particular has been the victim of politics. Each side has in interest in presenting it as higher or lower, particularly relative to the flu. The true value is unknowable as it requires perfect test data. And the available data (case fatality rate) is rejected by the "it's just the flu" camp, because they say the true denominator is much higher.
But honestly, who cares about the actual number? The flu death rate is subject to the same problems. Nobody gets tested for asymptomatic flu. We're should be comparing the CFR for flu to the CFR for COVID, and this shouldn't be an argument.... But it is.
CDC: In the US, the flu has killed 12,000-61,000 per year over the last decade. According to the worldometer page, COVID19 has killed 91,000. Since January.
WHO: (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/influenza-(...) Worldwide, flu causes 290,000 to 650,000 respiratory deaths. Worldometer reports 316,000 COVID19 deaths. Since January. And I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that is off on the low side. But it's still early.
2. The flu is a known, covid was a near complete unknown. It's easy in hindsight to say that we shouldn't have locked down, but if the thing had mutated and wiped out half the planet, you'd be singing a different tune.
Okay, now open Table 5 on that same spreadsheet. And take a look at the numbers for the year 2000.
# of deaths Jan-Aug (due to either flu, pneumonia or Covid)
2000: 40,436
2020: 14,013 + 48,168
Yes, this is significant and certainly Covid seems to be able to spread across a vulnerable population much more quickly than the flu but it doesn't seem to be orders of magnitude deadlier on balance. I get why people thought it was 10-20x in the beginning but it seems as we've learned more it is not the plague we thought it was.
Also note the numbers for August have already flipped so that 4x more people are dying of flu and pneumonia now than of Covid.
COVID is unlikely dramatically more deadly than the flu, so the question is, if you're okay sharing your health data over COVID, why not the flu? It kills 650,000 people (60,000 Americans) every single year. The reality is widespread panic moments are when we lose our civil rights.
Remember 9/11? That year more people died slipping and falling in the shower than died in the twin towers. More people died because they chose to drive short distances instead of flying than died in the twin towers. And we got the Patriot act and a trillion dollar war. Humans have a way of overreacting.
See my previous comment here, that is a good starting point for my position. Happy to answer any questions. (BTW I made a statement in that post that covid is an order of magnitude less deadly than the flu for those under 30, I no longer stand by that statement because it’s been hard to get age-stratified influenza IFR data as well as the uncertainty of covid-related mortality data. I still think the statement is true for <18 due to the varying risk distributions that I explained in that post)
—
Incidentally, I should have listened to my gut and not posted in this thread originally since I fear I might be derailing this discussion. So, I’m sorry for that. But for now I don’t think deleting my comment in this thread is a good idea at this point since we might end up having a useful discussion.
I actually dedicated much of my comment to addressing that, specifically pointing out that COVID represents a lifetime risk that's been front-loaded and so it's fair to compare COVID's infection fatality rate to your lifetime risk of dying in a car accident. I also called out explicitly that COVID has been front-loaded.
Also, it's not a fair comparison between the flu and COVID because the flu has that unfortunate feature known as horizontal gene transfer. That's why you can get re-infected by the flu each year, and why in spite of a massive vaccination campaign the flu causes 45,000,000 illnesses each year in the US alone (and 60,000 deaths) -- and 650,000 deaths worldwide.
Each year. And each upcoming year. COVID will, based on what we know so far, happen once.
Thanks for that. I don't understand the discrepancy between the article and the link you posted, however from your cite of 7,961 flu deaths (in the US) agrees with what the sciam article said.
> Excess deaths are all that really matters. Why not talk about those instead?
Good point, but I don't have them. What my and your posts seem to show is that flu is a heck of a lot less mortal than this covid. Which is the point.
1. It seems like people are severely underrating the flu and always have been. Remember when we closed all restaurants and bars and suspended all sports events when the flu killed an estimated 1 million people in 1968-1969? No you don’t because society seemed to have shrugged that one off. Ditto for many years when the flu kills upwards of 600k worldwide [1] 2. The reported CFR (Case Fatality Rates) across different countries is all over the place causing a lot of panic and overstated mortality rates. Countries like Italy report almost 7% whereas in Germany and South Korea, the CFR makes Covid-19 look like no big deal (Closer to 0.1%). I suspect that’s because Italy is well under counting the true denominator, while countries like SK have tested thousands of people per day making their data much more comprehensive.
There’s something unique about this year’s outbreak that seems to resonate deeply with more people. Ultimately it’s definitely not “just the flu” but it’s closer to that then a guaranteed death sentence.
We may see more damage from the secondary effects (people losing jobs, runs on medicine and supplies causing people to die) than from the virus itself.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H3... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:2019%E2%80%9320_cor...
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