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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

If you have to be hospitalized for the flu, you are pretty close to death's door. It's not a very common occurance.

Hospitalization for COVID is, unfortunately, quite common.

That really depends on the particular flu strain. All are dangerous to frail and elderly patients. Some stains are also likely to cause cytokine storms in young, healthy patients.

> Some stains are also likely to cause cytokine storms in young, healthy patients.

Wasn't this the case with the 1918 spanish flu? Kids had no issues, due to undeveloped immune systems, elder had little issues, due to old, shitty immune systems, and the 'middle' generations got fscked by the virus.

The problem is that far too many people are blasé about flu.

Flu is a nasty disease, a killer with severe repurcussions for certain people.

And it is very likely to kill and harm younger people.

There’s a reason we have a vaccine for flu - despite it being monumentally difficult to produce one.

Quite the opposite. Covid is dangerous for elderly and people having severe medical condition, much, much less dangerous for young and healthy. Flu is more dangerous to young people than Covid.

Flu also causes hospitalizations in comparable amounts to Covid[1]. Note that we have a vaccine for flu, and it is still causing almost a million hospitalizations in bad seasons.

...because people do not get vaccinated.

Keep in mind that the vaccine has, on average, efficacy of 50%.

Yes, I bore that in mind when I made the statement. Especially the younger people the GP talked about do not bother getting flu shots. If everyone got vaccinated, the yearly influenza waves would result in way fewer deaths.

Since you can get both influenza and Covid-19, even at the same time, German health authorities have strongly recommended getting flu shots and started the vaccination campaign earlier this year. It's good advice. Get your flu shot!

And here's the missing reference:

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

Flu kills a lot of old people every year. Covid isn't that much worse than a bad flu season.

Hospitals were being over whelemed a couple of years ago. https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...

Also the general population of adults (not even adults hospitalized with the flu) is going to be drastically worse in overall health before infection when compared to college athletes. So "this happens with the flu too" isn't too helpful without there being some comparison to how often it happens with COVID versus the flu.

"Hospitalization for COVID is, unfortunately, quite common."

Not in the demographic followed in this study. Amongst healthy 19-year-olds the flu represents about the same threat of both hospitalization and death, and flu is possibly a little bit worse than Covid:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

https://www.lung.org/getmedia/98f088b5-3fd7-4c43-a490-ba8f47...

Yeah, is unfortunate the world is not made of healthy 19 year olds otherwise this would be a significant discovery.

If we're concerned about the risk of COVID-19 to cause morbidity in youth, like these reports indicate could be a problem, it's reasonable to compare the frequency to other risks out there that we accept-- will it cause more morbidity in this population than a typical flu year? Less? About the same? It's a reasonable yardstick to use.

I don't see how the provided links support your statements.

It's pretty straightforward: they show fatality numbers for Covid and Flu in the specified age-brackets (19) that are comparable. Covid might be a bit higher. As I said.

They are not IFR numbers.

They are, in fact, estimates of IFR.

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