Italy historically has had excess mortality for influenza | Hacker News Reader

Italy historically has had excess mortality for influenza

ijidonline.com

16 pointsformerchamp25 comments

The case fatality is <1%, Italy just has a lot of people infected with SARS-CoV-2. There must be over a million cases in Italy, they just aren’t able to test everyone. The age distribution is similar in South Korea.

As bad as Italy is, India worries me the most by far.

Do you have evidence that Italy has more infected than anywhere else? Because, that is what this would take, at this point.

No direct evidence. But any reasonable parameters for the viral reproductive number and mortality, along with clear evidence of asymptomatic carriage, lead to this inevitable conclusion.

To be fair, I agree the expected case to death rate is less than one percent normally. The questions this leads to, is why it is higher on Italy? Either in reach of infection, or in deaths?

This article implies their infection to death rate was already elevated for the flu. Most accept this is, at best, a deadly flu. That would strengthen this hypothesis.

But your hypothesis seems to be there are more infected in Italy than elsewhere. But you then have to explain why it did more there.

If we have infection to death rates in all countries, that would let us predict if the first hypothesis is true. To test yours? What can we do?

I don’t think there is anything special about Italy, they just started earlier than other countries (1st cases were 3 weeks before other Euro countries) and in some provinces didn’t take it seriously.

Per another thread, the US has to start seeing the numbers they have had to date every two days for this to be worse then last year's flu. Per this article, Italy has to continue with their current pace to hit last year's numbers. For another few weeks.

Let that sink in. Italy had 25,000 deaths attributed to flu like illness two years ago. They are at 6000. Accepting that this is a hard flu like virus, we would expect them to have bad numbers. Why? What is so bad about Italy?

Again, comparing to the flu is not minimizing. The flu is already a terrible virus.

What's the CFR when you do deaths/(deaths+recovered).

Calculating deaths/cases is very misleading, as there are many people still in the "pipeline"

That number requires you to know the total recovered. With asymptomatic becoming popular from this, hard to believe we know that number. And many reasons to believe total cases is undercounted everywhere. To the point that we are seeing negative effects from skyrocketing numbers due largely to testing increases.

I'd like to note that so far we only know the mortality rate under the assumption that every patient that needs to be hospitalized (~18% of infected looking at NY's numbers) receives treatment. That is why the elderly and people with underlying health conditions are dying – they can't survive being in an ICU with a nasty disease a lot of the time.

Once we run out of beds and ventilators, the picture will look very different. I don't know about you, but I'm not old but I'd much rather be in a hospital if I have a nasty case of pneumonia, but we certainly can't fit 40-80% of the population in hospitals, let alone have enough health workers to treat them.

I'm not sure what you are claiming.

This article would imply that Italy was coming closer to saturation on hospitals before this virus. Not claiming that this virus wasn't worse. The implication is they were closing to a topping point than elsewhere.

It does fit, in that so far Italy is the outlier, not anyone else. Japan, in particular, but also Norway, Germany, and most of the US.

I think Spain throws a but of a wrench at this, but don't have that looked at handily.

Can we trust Italy's numbers? They're attributing any questionable death to corona to hide their embarrassing influenza death rate. This can almost explain USA's minuscule death toll at 500 (influenza season averages 200/day).

I don’t think so.

Italy is counting ALL deaths as Covid deaths.

Their Covid numbers are simply incorrect.

Just curious, do you have a source?

For a week I've been wondering about Germany's numbers. Maybe they are doing something wrong, or maybe it is China and Italy that are giving us bad data.

Do you have charts backing that 500 a day claim handy?

~500 total. Still a far cry from business as usual flu @ 200/day.

That isn't a chart. Or even a reference. :(

Where are you getting these numbers?

There are several MSM sites reporting the death toll of US corona victims and they hover around 500 total at the moment. Note that they're very liberally grouping deaths into the corona bucket so I expect the number to be much lower in a post mortem. It's going to be like Trump's 2016 win where everyone was left scratching their heads and wondering how their math/fake science failed them.

My flu death rate of 200/day comes from the CDC's last year figure of 34000 / 6 months (a really stretched flu season).

Thanks for referencing the cdc numbers. Google quickly confirmed that, and is what I was asking for. I hoped to have it per month, but don't see that immediately.

Any chance you know where to find this for other countries?

For those wondering if the people minimizing this disease as nothing more than a weaker influenza are correct, here's some data from new york's hospitals: https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-s...

Visits to emergency for Influenza-likeIllness+Pneumonia is at ~1.5x a bad flu season's peak and ~4x a normal flu season. Admissions for the same are at ~2-3x.

I think people are claiming it is a stronger flu, not weaker.

I think there are lots of people that don't realize how many die of the flu every year, but that is a different claim.

Great dataset! does this get updated frequently? We just need 3-6 more weeks to know how this plays out. Do we hit 50x flu deaths or 5x flu deaths...

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