Don't forget the '17 flu seasons was 65k deaths in the US. So we're at a little under 3x right now. So yes, Covid is worse, but we don't bat an eye at 65k deaths due to the flu.
How can we compare Covid numbers to the flu when the US has gone into lockdown, schools closed, everyone that can is WFH. No concerts or sporting events
totally different circumstances
Sweden might be a more accurate comparison since they didn’t go into full lockdown and it’s at 10x
This is simply not true in general. The vast majority of people who come down with covid have a minor illness, and many of them do not even realise what it was. I have three friends who had positive tests and no symptoms beyond those of the common cold. All of the available data supports this being the normal case, and serious complications being either a rare case of bad luck, or a result of underlying illnesses.
> a good amount of those discharged form hospital are looking at permanently reduced lung function
If you have any respiratory infection serious enough to put you in the hospital, you're probably looking at a longer recovery and possibly at long-term reduced lung function. But the relatively young & healthy mostly don't end up in hospital with covid, just as they don't end up in hospital when they get the flu.
Selecting only the most serious cases (hospital admissions) and talking about their outcomes is not useful for drawing general conclusions about the pandemic or the way countries have chosen to respond to it.
In the last ten years we (in the US) have lost +500,000 people to the flu.
For some reason the people that died from the flu must be lesser in value because nobody did anything about it.
You would think that a single year of 65k deaths would be enough for everybody to wear masks the following flu season. And yet?
No economic shutdowns. No masks. No restrictions on schools. Literally nothing other than vaccines that mostly don’t work.
How is that an argument for less-drastic measures?
The "with shutdowns, masks and closed schools" line also assumes the effectiveness of all those measures, and ignores the glaring problem that they simply kick the can down the road -- there is no appetite for shutdowns and closed schools until the end of 2021, but a vaccine could easily take that long (if not longer) to be generally available -- assuming any of the current vaccine candidates work well. So what, exactly, is the plan?
For flu you're using sophisticated statistical modelling of excess death combined with community surveillance of use of primary and secondary care. This will tend to overcount.
For covid-19 you're using "died after testing positive for covid, or with covid mentioned as the cause on the death certificate". This will tend to undercount (even when taking into account the slight overcount involved in people who die from other things after a +ve test).
I think this so called Doctor is just trying to push a narrative and links to no research or sources for any of his assumptions or data.
This article has no credibility.
1) Only as long as they are old people. The moment flu kills even a couple children, everybody goes apoplectic.
2) I suspect that one of the takeaways from Covid is going to be that viruses (even flu) cause a lot more long-term damage than we give them credit for. Nobody was funding brain or circulatory scans for flu patients--we're going to get some of that data as a side benefit of all the Covid analysis.
And the flu certainly can cause long-term damage.
"Other possible serious complications triggered by flu can include inflammation of the heart (myocarditis), brain (encephalitis) or muscle (myositis, rhabdomyolysis) tissues, and multi-organ failure (for example, respiratory and kidney failure). Flu virus infection of the respiratory tract can trigger an extreme inflammatory response in the body and can lead to sepsis, the body’s life-threatening response to infection."[2]
[1]https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm [2]https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/symptoms.htm#complications