What makes Covid different and what caused the shutdowns was when Lombardy alone had 450 deaths a day. No regular influenza could do that.
It's not as if we decided out of thin air the virus was dangerous.
Sure it could. The whole point of the IFR calculation is that it gives you an average perspective on how fatal a disease is, relative to other diseases. It's not an absolute maximum fatality rate, for every circumstance.
Put a strain of "normal" flu in a vulnerable population with no pre-existing immunity, and it would do a lot of damage. But if you don't count all the other people who had it without symptoms, then you get a misleading picture.
Also, of course, you have to realize that the population of "Lombardy" (~10M) is a bit larger than the population of New York City (~8M), where we see 100-300 deaths per day as a baseline mortality rate:
https://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/population-geography/pop...
Italy as a whole is now seeing new cases per day roughly twice that observed in the spring, and yet deaths are up a tiny fraction of what you would expect from the Lombardy example. So it's not clear that Lombardy represents a typical outcome, even for Italy:
http://opendatadpc.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...
Point being, again, it's difficult to draw conclusions from data points that are on the extremes of the distribution. The IFR is a measurement of average behavior.
Testing was awful in the spring, serological surveys were made in June and estimated that only 15% roughly of the cases were caught and other surveys estimated even lower percentages (as low as 6%). The territorial distribution is also much more even this time, so it is easier to cope for the healthcare system.
My point is that any a priori estimate of the IFR falls apart if the healthcare system fails and the purpose of lockdown is to avoid that. You don't lock down because it's the only way to keep the IFR down; you lock down when you realize that tracing is failing to capture and/or isolate many cases, and therefore lockdown is the only remaining way to keep the IFR down.
That said, the claim for 45,000 excess deaths in March and April appears to come from this:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
With this table having the details:
https://www.thelancet.com/cms/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)31865-1/...
The 45,000 number in that table is for all of Italy, whereas Lombardy specifically had excess mortality of 25,212 in March and April, with another ~700 in May. So that's 420 excess deaths a day in March/April, over a baseline of 275 (16,480 deaths in Lombardy, on average, for March and April of 2015-2019). This is nowhere near the 650 excess deaths per day you claimed in the GGP comment, but is a factor of about 2.5x over baseline.
For whatever it's worth, here's a paper that makes a claim of a much lower excess mortality figure of 5740 for Bergamo, and 3703 in Lombardy in the first four months of 2020, using better-controlled models for mortality in the regions:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7520169/
I think it's somewhat pointless to debate the exact number of people dying every day, because we'll never know, and in any case, the virus was clearly quite deadly in that place at that time. However, both of these sources note that excess mortality spiked in March and April, and by May, had returned to below normal levels. So whatever happened in Lombardy, it was a statistical anomaly, and we should be careful extrapolating from it.
Did the virus cause significant excess mortality in Lombardy in March and April? Yes. Could the flu cause similar levels of excess mortality in a naive population? It can, and it has. The 1958 pandemic killed about 116,000 people in the US, which is well above the 12,000-60,000 people we see per year in modern times, and worse on a population-adjusted basis:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1957-1958-pandemi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_influenza_statis...
People like to make comparisons to the 1918 pandemic, but if anything, Covid-19 appears to be on par with the 1958 pandemic in terms of overall severity.
But this is kind of exactly what we did. Go look at a yearly all-cause mortality chart going back the last 110 years. You’ll see this year is a noticeable but not so great uptick (of which many of the deaths will be overdoses, suicides, lack of medical treatment for preventable diseases etc btw). Whereas say the 1918 Flu pandemic was much more deadly in absolute and relative terms both.
Remember we’re talking about a disease that for many is so mild that they never realize they have it. For others like the very elderly it can be very bad, with a 5% chance of dying if infected, but it’s no surprise that surveys that ask people to estimate COVID-19 mortality show that on average people overestimate the fatality by between 10-100x.
SARS-2 is real, but the real virus really is in our minds. I hope one day you will come to see things my way too.
I also hope more commenters here will go mode out what happens when you perform universal rather than targeted mitigation measures: universal ends up with more mortality by slowing down infections in those who are not at risk, which delays hers immunity for almost no benefit.
So if you take the worst flu season - which we count as a year - we're almost 5x that with covid and its not even a full year yet...
If you take the best flu year, we're pushing 100x that.
Where are we over estimating anything when we break it down into simple terms?
Which btw, these current death rates are with active measures in place. If we didn't have these measures then the trends set early on would be off the charts by now.
Sweden contradicts this.
> So if you take the worst flu season - which we count as a year - we're almost 5x that with covid and its not even a full year yet...
The way we count COVID deaths is fundamentally different from how we count Flu deaths.
It's much better to look at total deaths and compare to previous years. You'll see we've experienced an uptick this year but not one that is nearly as massive as you would predict based off the hysteria
Really, the only hysteria there is, is from people like you projecting it.
Wearing a mask and socially distancing is rational.
This applies to all of Europe though. Places like France, Germany, Belgium, and Italy are all seeing skyrocketing daily cases.
From what I remember, it’s not that Sweden didn’t encourage mask wearing or social distancing, it just didn’t make anything mandatory, and it didn’t enforce any lockdowns. It hasn’t particularly saved their economy from any damage, although it didn’t seem to cause them to have rates of infection or deaths to get much worse than the average in Europe, and their hospitals didn’t get overwhelmed.
If anything, it seems to demonstrate that the idea that avoiding lockdowns will save the economy isn’t realistic, and the economy, but lockdowns aren’t going to help much either.
At this point it seems like all anyone can do is wear a mask, do what you can to socially distance while living a relatively normal life, and wait for either a vaccine or the pandemic to pass its course.
Yet, people, who i assume are smart people, say that we're overreacting and we're causing societal harm and taking away their freedoms.
I can only laugh and cringe...
History shows that those cities that took active measures in every prior epidemic survived better and recovered better and thrived after.
This isn't our first pandemic, wont' be our last. Where we failed is we were woefully unprepared, our administration convinced people it's not that bad but here we are months later, deaths are still pushing upwards of 1,000 americans a day and people are saying its no worse than the flu.
There is no evidence to support this argument unless you're trying to deceive people.
You don't even need to know statistics. Take the worst flue year where we had 48k deaths that year. Covid is 5x worse that and we still haven't even made it through an entire year.
Take our best flue year - 1986-87 - where only 2,868 or so died. We'll be 100x times worse than that year with COVID alone and we're just NOW entering the common flu season.
The basic math doesn't support some of these studies that seem to use statistics for political gain rather than simple math for communicating the obvious differences.
And lets not forget - the death toll is only under control because we are taking active measures.
assault for wearing masks, or failing to wear masks? I'm only aware of the former.
(2) We all have seen the images of hospitals overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, not having enough breathers, etc. For some reason this doesn't happen with the typical annual influenza ...
If you reduce everything to statistics about mortality rates, you are missing very important parts of the picture.
(2) Actually we didn't. My wife works in a small city hospital. They only have 4 beds with respirators and almost never had more than 2-3 people at a time there. The city is being locked down the second time because we have 5 infected in 20k. We also had in the region of 20 (real) COVID deaths since March. All over 80.
There is no complete picture as all hospitals and clinics have a financial incentive to declare COVID deaths as opposed to anything else. Some do keep internal unofficial stats but even those are rare.
"It didn't happen to me so it must not be happening anywhere else"
In general, we can say that in the overwhelming majority of cases, hospitals did not get overwhelmed with COVID patients like some of the models predicted. That may change as we move into the second winter season, but it's not a foregone conclusion.
Second, every successful preemptive measure is by definition an overreaction. Perhaps you don't see more overwhelmed hospitals precisely because lockdowns are effectively preventing that.
Of course, but you need a significant amount of hospitals to be overwhelmed to cause significant excess death. Remember, we're trying to minimize excess death of all causes, not just COVID-19.
> Second, every successful preemptive measure is by definition an overreaction. Perhaps you don't see more overwhelmed hospitals precisely because lockdowns are effectively preventing that.
Sure, but that insight doesn't really help. Maybe that's true, maybe it isn't. Given that neither Brazil nor Sweden had a lockdown and given that neither of their healthcare systems collapsed as some models predicted, my guess would be that a lockdown isn't necessary to prevent such a collapse.
Sweden could be a special case, but Brazil literally had 0.1% of its population wiped out. In Manaus there were five time as many excess deaths as confirmed COVID deaths. If that's not healthcare collapsing I don't know what it is.
Sure, you may have very high excess death in a few areas, but unless you think people from New York are somehow more important than everyone else, all excess deaths must be weighted equally. Remember, we're trying to optimize for all-cause mortality across the entire country.
> Sweden could be a special case, but Brazil literally had 0.1% of its population wiped out.
Every year, Brazil loses 0.65% of its population to all-cause mortality. COVID-Mortality in Brazil may be high, but it is pretty much on par with Chile, which has had a severe lockdown.
> In Manaus there were five time as many excess deaths as confirmed COVID deaths. If that's not healthcare collapsing I don't know what it is.
Yes, for a brief period, hospitals in certain cities did indeed get overwhelmed. That's very visible.
What isn't visible is people that would suffer and die in the next years because their livelihoods were destroyed because of a lockdown of questionable efficacy.
In Chile, you have starving protestors clashing with the police. In Brazil, approval for Bolsonaro is at the highest since his presidency started. Put two and two together.
Also, consider that they have to mostly shut down the rest of the hospital due to staffing issues - but also the highly infectious nature of COVID.
Left unchecked, every hospital will hit their limits quickly. That'a a distinguishing characteristic of this one.
Edit: here is what the curve looks like without suppression measures in place. In NYC they came essentially to capacity very quickly. Imagine if that curve had of kept going, it would have been very bad.
It's the same R0 everywhere, the 'effective R' will come down to the difference being the age and relative health of the population, and of course other suppressive measures being taken.
[1] https://forward.ny.gov/daily-hospitalization-summary-region [2] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page
Are you sure about that? it's probably not the same extent as what has happened with covid-19, but some hospitals do get overwhelmed during flu season.
A quick google search pre-2019 returns a lot of results, for instance:
https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
That's the real problem with the disease, not only the fatality rate and long-term effects, but how quickly and severely it can bring a hospital system and all associated healthcare to its knees.
What is the rate of this?
> Symptoms might take a long time to fade; a study posted on the preprint server medRxiv in August followed up on people who had been hospitalized, and found that even a month after being discharged, more than 70% were reporting shortness of breath and 13.5% were still using oxygen at home.
> One study of 143 people with COVID-19 discharged from a hospital in Rome found that 53% had reported fatigue and 43% had shortness of breath an average of 2 months after their symptoms started. A study of patients in China showed that 25% had abnormal lung function after 3 months, and that 16% were still fatigued.
SARS-2 radiological abnormalities resolve in months and this is for hospitalized cases which are by definition more severe than your usual cases.
There is really no evidence of what you claim.
We’re now 7 months into the major part of this pandemic and people are still stuck citing the fears we all had in April.
very haphazard but at least will give you pointers to most of the studies
> Evidence from people infected with other coronaviruses suggests that the damage will linger for some. A study published in February recorded long-term lung harm from SARS, which is caused by SARS-CoV-1. Between 2003 and 2018, Peixun Zhang at Peking University People’s Hospital in Beijing and his colleagues tracked the health of 71 people who had been hospitalized with SARS. Even after 15 years, 4.6% still had visible lesions on their lungs, and 38% had reduced diffusion capacity, meaning that their lungs were poor at transferring oxygen into the blood and removing carbon dioxide from it.
That said, it's notable that:
* They don't have a control group (makes it impossible to know what the baseline rate of these symptoms is in the population).
* They don't measure the various criteria for "organ impairment" before the participants caught covid (makes it impossible to know if the people who were found to be abnormal were abnormal before catching the virus -- there are a fair number of smokers and obese people in this sample, so this isn't an idle concern).
* They find a fairly strong association with hospitalization (i.e. the people who are sickest, end up having the most lingering symptoms).
* The people who were sickest tended to have the most pre-existing risk factors for the same outcomes being measured by the study (i.e. there's a hidden correlate).
Because of these limitations, you can't really draw any broad conclusions from this study. In general, I'd say that it shows that older / obese / unhealthy people are more likely to have both severe Covid, as well as concomitant symptoms of severe Covid.
To some of your other points, the high end leagues are quite well medically documented, and the individuals are quite healthy.
That said, it also appears for some individuals, initial “long term” damage (ongoing heart or liver problems three months after recovery) may be less or gone some six months in.
Seems answers are as yet by and large unresolved. In situations where one does not yet know the actual risk, one may prefer an abundance of caution over unknown “calculated” risk given the long tail of possible effects.
I'm aware of one publication, which showed 4 athletes with heart-inflammation markers in a sample of 26 athletes:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...
If there are others you're aware of, I'm interested in the links.
For studyi these supposed long-term effects I like to look at SARS-1 studies since we’ve had almost two decades. What we find is a few months of raidological ling abnormalities that heal, and mild cognitive deficits that linger for up to a year before disappearing completely. SARS-1 is miles worse than SARS-2 so the idea that young asymptomatic COVID-19 cases will end up with long term health problems is just completely farcical.
Unfortunately reading these studies requires a very critical lens. You showed that in your above comments but, for example, the person alleging these unproven and speculative long term impacts appears not to take that critical approach.
Generally agreed. There have been a few papers on this, and most of them were...flawed. To say the least.
This paper is the latest to suggest lurking heart problems in young healthy people, and while the sample is quite small and the observed metrics are questionable, I haven't seen anyone seriously attack the methodology. But in general, I'm skeptical of the claim as well, and I wouldn't suggest that this paper is definitive evidence of anything.
"Unfortunately reading these studies requires a very critical lens. You showed that in your above comments but, for example, the person alleging these unproven and speculative long term impacts appears not to take that critical approach."
100% agreed. It's been a general problem with all of these Covid-related pre-prints. Terrible, flawed studies get picked up by the media and credulously reported. By the time the flaws are found by serious researchers, the media is on to the next headline, never taking time to correct the record.
(2) absolutely does happen in bad flu seasons, and by the way most of those images are misleading or taken from prior years. Seriously. Even in say, New York, you’d have hospital A overflowing yet hospital B 10 miles away was at 30% capacity remaining. At least in the US a true overrun scenario never happened yet most don’t realize this.
You have to understand the role that mass collective delusion has played in our misguided response. And the media’s selective reporting doesn’t help.
Nitpicking here, Sars-1 is, as I understand, more infectious but also more obvious. So you don't have asymptomatic spread and other things. This ultimately comes down to exactly what you mean by "infectious" though.
> is totally unproven speculation.
At this point we have more known Covid-19 long haulers in the US than there are Sars-1 infections globally. Comparisons to SARS-1 don't much matter.
> absolutely does happen in bad flu seasons
Indeed it does, most people weren't aware of this, and covid-19 making people more aware of the danger of the flu isn't a bad thing. Get vaccinated!
> you’d have hospital A overflowing yet hospital B 10 miles away was at 30% capacity remaining.
There was a period of time when NYC was globally short on ventilators and ICU beds. Raw hospital beds were never a real concern.
Also worth remembering that NYC would have run out of hospital beds entirely if they didn't implement strict lockdown measures. The NYC (or really NY) stay at home order went into effect on March 20, and daily cases peaked plateaued 1.5 weeks later.
By infectious I meant the basic reproduction number, but I believe SARS-2 is also more infectious (in the sense if likelihood of infection per exposure event) given its incredibly high binding affinities. It seems to be unusually good at infecting humans in a way SARS-1 wasn’t. Not sure if that’s due to furin cleavage or what. I’m a bit rusty on the mechanics there so open to dissenting opinions.
Also I don’t believe SARS-2 exhibits asymptomatic spread; that seems to be largely a myth. It does undeniably exhibit PRE-SYMPTOMATIC spread however. My hunch is that the early course interferon mediated immunosuppression explains that phenomenon.
IMO the true asymptomatics (never showing symptoms) are asymptomatic largely because of T-cell cross reactivity which theoretically will reduce or entirely prevent spread. Thus why we really don’t have good evidence of asymptomatic spread but we have a wealth of evidence on pre-symptomatic.
> Also worth remembering that NYC would have run out of hospital beds entirely if they didn't implement strict lockdown measures. The NYC (or really NY) stay at home order went into effect on March 20, and daily cases peaked plateaued 1.5 weeks later.
There is absolutely no way for you to prove this nor for me to disprove it, which tells you about its explanatory value. I personally find it much more likely that the dropoff in cases is purely explainable by timing; NY was already rounding the bend when it enforced its (IMO pseudoscientific and deleterious) measures.
Basically everywhere in the globe, including Sweden, showed a large uptick for some time followed by a peak and wind-down. That’s just the pattern infectious diseases show. To immediately attribute it to human intervention when SARS-2 landed on our shores months earlier than originally thought just seems like hubris to me. In any case the statement is not falsifiable so I won’t focus on it any further.
> There was a period of time when NYC was globally short on ventilators and ICU beds.
New York as a whole was a huge proponent of early invasive ventilation which probably ended up killing people unnecessarily. NY’s implied IFR was something like .7%, a number so bad it is unmatched by anywhere else in the US. My guess is not good pre-existing Vitamin D3 levels exacerbated by being directed to stay inside, combined with stress, fear, lack of exercise and lost sleep attributable to lockdown + general hysteria, and finally the aforementioned iatrogenic harm caused by excessive ventilation.
In retrospect it seemed the ventilator panic was only marginally more rational than the toilet paper panic.
I should note that, if we assume every use of a ventilator prevented a certain death, ventilators still had only a marginal effect since something like 90% of those ventilated died, and it’s only those with incredibly severe COVID-19 who end up ventilated (well, ironically except NY which seemed to ventilate “early and often”, so the cases were still severe but not incredibly severe)
> At this point we have more known Covid-19 long haulers in the US than there are Sars-1 infections globally. Comparisons to SARS-1 don't much matter.
I have a lot of trouble believing in a bunch of anecsotsl cases of people on Twittwr with very obvious political leanings, given that most long haulers I have seen are in popupations with next to no risk or SARS-2. It’s much more likely to be that the 20-something year olds are either inducing psychosomatic symptoms, or exaggerating their actual symptoms, or coincidentally got Epstein-Barr virus or similar at the same time.
I would expect bad COVID cases to have lingering effects for a few months, sure. But not “long-term” - although maybe we have different definitions there. Fatigue 1 month after successful resolution of infection doesn’t really say anything to me. But to give you something more tangible, I don’t believe anyone who’s in their 20s and otherwise healthy is really experiencing this mysterious syndrome, with a few very rare exceptions of course. You have to keep in mind the incredible psychoemotional environment we are living in currently.
Yes, I mostly agree with this characterization.
> There is absolutely no way for you to prove this nor for me to disprove it, which tells you about its explanatory value. I personally find it much more likely that the dropoff in cases is purely explainable by timing; NY was already rounding the bend when it enforced its (IMO pseudoscientific and deleterious) measures.
There are multiple studies that support my assertion (that lockdowns reduce R0 and without them cases continue growing at near-exponential rates). Thanks to a wide variety of government policies, we have reasonable sample sizes. See for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7268966/ (longitudinal) and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7293850/ (correlational). So yes, I'd argue your assertion here is wrong and there's strong evidence to state that.
> Basically everywhere in the globe, including Sweden, showed a large uptick for some time followed by a peak and wind-down.
This is a misconception. While not as extreme as other places, Sweden did implement social distancing measures. And you're actually incorrect about the shape of sweden's case count graph. It went up, paused, went up again a month later, and then went down some.
You can argue all kinds of things about herd immunity and whatnot, but that's not well supported. From the evidence we have the only conclusion you can make is that lockdowns do work in reducing spread, and they keep spread low later. That's the only conclusion based in evidence. Anything else is based on conjecture about things unseen.
> My guess is not good pre-existing Vitamin D3 levels exacerbated by being directed to stay inside, combined with stress, fear, lack of exercise and lost sleep attributable to lockdown + general hysteria, and finally the aforementioned iatrogenic harm caused by excessive ventilation.
Like this. This is not supported by any evidence. It was possible to go outside, it was possible to exercise. Stress and fear would be raised independent of lockdown measures. You're being just as hysterical about stay at home orderers as you accuse lawmakers of being about covid.
> I have a lot of trouble believing in a bunch of anecsotsl cases of people on Twittwr with very obvious political leanings, given that most long haulers I have seen are in popupations with next to no risk or SARS-2. It’s much more likely to be that the 20-something year olds are either inducing psychosomatic symptoms, or exaggerating their actual symptoms, or coincidentally got Epstein-Barr virus or similar at the same time.
I generally agree that long haulers are probably at least somewhat exaggerated, but we have indisputable evidence that serious, but non-fatal cases cause long lasting side effects in many (most!) severe patients (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02598-6). If that eventually wears off, that's good, but until we understand these things further, we should be cautious. A disease with a .4% IFR is very different than one with a .4% IFR and a 2% or 5% chance of leaving you with lifelong severe breathing problems, and there's a reasonable chance that Covid-19 is the second and not the first.
And when you add in fewer older people getting infected when there are fewer infections in general, well, there you go.
I'd wager there's a lot of people whose kids are running around a shantytown shoeless who would disagree with your levels of risk.
'threshold you'd accept' isn't a response to my comment, which expressly rejects the idea that there are only 2 options. Some mitigations are only justified by very high levels of risk. Others are justified by much lower levels of risk.
(I did the math myself using CDC estimates for both the flu and covid and assuming a 50% asymptomatic rate for the flu.)
These numbers are patently false. If this was even remotely true pretty much every family would know someone who has died from the flu at some point.
The flu numbers are statistical evaluations based on no actual death counts. The real numbers of deaths from the flu are very likely much, much smaller.
You are of course welcome to ignore the CDC. You have a lot of company these days.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking...
You can look at past graphs here for a number of European countries to see how countries like Norway and Finland compare to e.g. the U.K. and Sweden. This helps dispel any myths about lockdowns themselves causing significant excess mortality: https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/
If a vaccine is tested on 10,000 people, and appears safe, we call it good enough, without waiting for several years to check on the possibility of long-term affects. It's not like vaccines have never had problems, but at some point you need to go by what you actually know and have seen, and the same logic applies to viruses (or any other risk). We haven't in fact seen anything that suggests a widespread problem in people who recover from covid-19, and given past results with SARS, MERS, and the four other coronaviruses which cause "colds", we don't have much reason to expect it. Could it happen in some significant percentage? Sure. The same is true of any virus, or for that matter any vaccine. But we don't gain anything from speculating on that.
Did they actually do any monitoring and reporting? There is aplenty of people around with long Covid, I know personally one guy, who was actually diagnosed with myocarditis he never had before.
> We haven't in fact seen anything that suggests a widespread problem in people who recover from covid-19, and given past results with SARS, MERS,
Actually lots and lots SARS survivors did develop long-term problems. Besides, experiments on animals show, both SARS-1 and MERS caused very severe Antigen-dependent enhancement, which made the attempt to produce a vaccine futile. Not many viruses are capable of doing this, mostly flavivuruses and betacoronaviruses.
We still don't have comparable stats on that - even for flu the stats are really all over the place: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029 """ There is very substantial heterogeneity in published estimates of case fatality risk for H1N1pdm09, ranging from <1 to >10,000 per 100,000 infections (Figure 3). Large differences were associated with the choice of case definition (denominator). Because influenza virus infections are typically mild and self-limiting, and a substantial proportion of infections are subclinical and do not require medical attention, it is challenging to enumerate all symptomatic cases or infections.2, 45 In 2009, some of the earliest available information on fatality risk was provided by estimates based primarily on confirmed cases. However, because most H1N1pdm09 infections were not laboratory-confirmed, the estimates based on confirmed cases were up to 500 times higher than those based on symptomatic cases or infections (Figure 3). The consequent uncertainty about the case fatality risk and hence about the severity of H1N1pdm09 was problematic for risk assessment and risk communication during the period when many decisions about control and mitigation measures were being made. """
Covid is way more virulent. If 10x more people get it, it doesn't need to be more deadly in terms of IFR to be a concern.
Sure, but what sort of concern? A "shut down everything, COVID-cases are rising!" sort of concern?
What? Of course we do. Influenza rapid tests are among the most common diagnostics during flu season. Epidemiologists rely on these tests as well as serological surveillance to derive IFR estimates for the various flu bugs, just as they do for covid.
But it doesn't matter. Your assertion was that flu and covid IFR's are "apples to oranges" because we're taking measures to reduce covid infections. This is nonsense on the simplest logical level. Reducing the infection rate doesn't reduce the danger to the individuals who do get infected, as long as the standard of care remains stable.