Demonstrably false. The US alone is over 50,000 deaths. This is already worse than an entire year's toll for the flu.
Are you going to claim that the numbers are fake? In that case, perhaps conveniently, no one can claim to be right.
In 2017/2018, we saw 50k ~ 60k pneumonia deaths. They then go back retroactively and estimate flu (in 2019, it was 20k to 60k).
So yes, we're past 50k COVID-19 deaths, but we're comparing three months on something that has an exponential growth and taper to a yearly average. It's not a good comparison.
If at the end of the year, COVID-19 deaths are at 70k, you could say it was 20k more than flu .. but keep in mind, the CDC is assigning everything as COVID-19 right now, and New York retroactively added 3,000 suspected deaths, leading to that bizarre one day spike.
I did a full write up on this:
https://battlepenguin.com/tech/fighting-with-the-data/
Working with the data is fucking frustrating right now. Here are my shitty charts:
Right now, more information continues to come out showing that COVID has a roughly .5% fatality rate when you try to add in the massive number of people with no symptoms. Iceland, California, New York are places that back these numbers up.
"keep in mind CDC is assigning everything COVID" exactly.
50% rate AT LEAST based on research out of Iceland. Backed up by research out of Stanford and New York.
Are you going to claim that the massive number of people who show no symptoms is fake? Perhaps conventiently?
50,000 means nothing unless you add the number infect to get fatality rate. REAL rate. which is trending under 1% and approaching the flu fatality rate.
https://reason.com/2020/04/09/preliminary-german-study-shows...
> Over the last two weeks, German virologists tested nearly 80 percent of the population of Gangelt for antibodies that indicate whether they'd been infected by the coronavirus. Around 15 percent had been infected, allowing them to calculate a COVID-19 infection fatality rate of about 0.37 percent. The researchers also concluded that people who recover from the infection are immune to reinfection, at least for a while.
Added to that is more information from New York that puts the fatality rate there at roughly the same rate.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/23/nyregion/coronavirus-new-...
> It would also mean that the fatality rate from the virus was relatively low, about 0.5 percent, Mr. Cuomo said.
You said nothing about death rates? I did... the rates are very important when it comes to decisions about whether or not we should lose our collective shit over it or not.
Something that's more communicable than others but less lethal than the flu? We can't contain it and shutting the country down is going to destroy more lives and cause more damage than COVID.
My original post was that COVID is less lethal. And it is turning out, that with more information coming out each day, this is true.
My definition of Less lethal = deaths / infection count.
I'd also add that it's hard to take current COVID death counts serious when hospitals across the country get paid more for COVID cases.
It's hard to not see hospitals that are hurting for money turn down 30% more money for the same cases.