Since I've been exposed over the last few months to roughly a million people claiming that COVID19 is no worse than the flu, it prompted me to look up just how many people die or are hospitalized from the flu every year.
US avg annual deaths (prev 9 years): 37,000
US avg annual hospitalizations (prev 9 years): 446,000
Clearly COVID19 is worse than this already (160k deaths, 317k hospitalizations, and more every day).
But put aside the COVID19 comparison, and that is still a lot of people who suffer or die from something that we have tools to prevent. How much of that could be avoided with better flu vaccine uptake, policies that support staying at home when you're sick, and the normalization of wearing masks in public?
Why weren't we already doing all of those things? I only did one of those things, and that feels kind of dumb now.