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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

I've been curious if the spikes we've seen since October is the flu season giving people with cold symptoms which get them out of the house to be tested and it caught many more asymptomatic people than usual.

While the vast majority of asymptomatic just stayed out of the system during the spring and summer.

Also, slightly off topic, but the recent spike in Turkey shows how mind-blowingly fast it can shutdown your country, they went from obscurity to 4th place in daily counts after US, India, and Brazil within a month, despite much lower population levels:

https://i.imgur.com/busPOrn.png

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...

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> I've been curious if the spikes we've seen since October is the flu season giving people with cold symptoms which get them out of the house to be tested and it caught many more asymptomatic people than usual.

You'd expect that to decrease positivity rates (by getting a wider pool of people to get tested), but instead the positivity rates --- the percentage of tests that are positive --- have been increasing.

That's a good point. The flu numbers tended to be higher, or at least they used to be, so if it is indeed 1 in 5 Americans (and similarly higher in other countries) and a high crossover between the two demographic groups, than it still could account for a partial increase at a minimum. There will of course be more than one contributing factor here.

But as I mentioned in another comment my pharmacist said she has barely sold any cough/cold syrup at all this year when by this time of the year they'd be flying off the shelves. The lockdown may have helped stopped common cold / flu spread as well. So my proposition may be insignificant.

Flu/cold have much lower presumptive R0's than COVID. So, in general, measures that are effective against COVID are fantastically effective against the flu (influenza isn't quite at historic lows for this time of year, but it's close).

My area is "minimal" in flu activity in the flu surveillance systems, but has increased COVID positivity rates from 3.3% to 5.4% in the past couple weeks, despite increased testing (and increased testing, in general, can be expected to push positivity rates down).

Masks would also seriously put a damper on any other respiratory virus, such as the flu.

Why would it decrease it? It seems to me it would only increase it. The people likely to get the flu are the same group likely to get covid. The flu is harder to get than covid.

> Why would it decrease it? It seems to me it would only increase it.

The people seeking tests were mainly two groups: people particularly concerned about COVID-- because of known exposure or COVID-specific symptoms, or people who occupationally are being tested because of surveillance.

If you water that down with people with the flu, you'd expect the positivity rate to go down: not that influenza carriers are even more likely to have COVID than those previous groups.

Influenza surveillance is showing "minimal" activity in my area, but a huge explosion in positivity rates for COVID-19 (3.3% to 5.4% in the past couple of weeks).

https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-case...

I don't know a good national set of equivalent graphs, but in California the hospitalizations are tracking the case counts with some delay, as are the deaths (though those are even more delayed), so I highly doubt you're just seeing additional asymptomatic cases.

The curve of the ICU cases vs overall hospitalized cases is interesting - it's lower, so potentially that could be good news like we're better at treating it now, or bad news that capacity is already low enough (<%10 in some counties) that it's harder to get an ICU bed than it used to be.

We are way better at treating it, there's just so many more cases. A lot of invisible cases where people get hardcore antivirals a day before they would be hospitalized, etc.

That's a start, although it'd then be good to compare to compare hospitalizations for flu as well to weed out some of the numbers.

I've long want to pull in some data locally and do so some data science on it.

Like ranking countries by cases vs population ratios.

> I’ve been curious if the spikes we’ve seen since October is the flu season giving people with cold symptoms which get them out of the house to be tested and it caught many more asymptomatic people than usual.

If that were the case, you wouldn’t see the hospitalization, ICU, and death rates surging at the usual delay behind the general case rates, but you do, which suggests that, no, the surge in COVID cases isn’t inflated significantly by finding COVID-asymptomatic cases with a concurrent symptomatic common cold.

Using masks and doing social distance I'm much less sick this year.

Almost no areas are seeing above-average utilization of hospital or ICU beds. It’s a media narrative that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

ICUs routinely run at 90% capacity during the winter. Right now, most states are below this.

You made this same argument here about 80,000 deaths ago.

Don’t know who you think you’re talking to, or why you think this is a rebuttal to a factual statement. Hospital utilization is pretty much in line with seasonal levels:

https://mobile.twitter.com/justin_hart/status/13277409970783...

https://protect-public.hhs.gov/pages/hospital-capacity

You have to cherry-pick individual hospitals to create the narrative that “hospitals are overwhelmed”....which is exactly what the news media has been doing.

I'm talking to you, that much should have been obvious.

You made an extremely similar argument months ago, about how ICU capacity was actually not high and that the media was blowing this out of proportion. That you're still trying to downplay all of this as 3,000 Americans die every day is pretty surprising even to me.

If you’re arguing that I’m consistent and factual, then I give up. You got me.

ICU capacity wasn’t abnormal months ago. I just provided you with evidence of that. It isn’t abnormal now, either.

Stop it with the hysteria about raw death counts. Do you even know what percentage of those “3,000 people a day” are dying with Covid as a secondary or tertiary cause?

(hint: most of them.)

Here’s another inconvenient fact: did you know that we’ve had over 100,000 excess deaths in 2020 that have nothing to do with Covid? Over 37,000 of them were from Alzheimer disease and dementia, alone.

Golly...that’s...2,000 deaths a week! Or about 1/3rd of all excess deaths this year.

https://cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

(click “Total number above average by cause”, and update the dashboard)

So your argument is that the 300,000+ excess American deaths in 2020 are caused by... what?

It saddens me to see so many people such as yourself fighting on the side of COVID-19 against humanity.

A particularly lethal form of media hysteria, apparently.

what an intellectually compelling rebuttal. when you have no counterargument, you resort to insults and mockery.

It's a summary of your repeated arguments in this thread and other threads. If that's an insult to you, then I don't think it's me that you should be angry at.

> you resort to insults and mockery

> But sure, go be “sad” about people sharing documented facts, instead. It’s much easier than critical thought, and it lets you feel morally superior. I can see why you prefer it.

Practice what you preach.

The comment I was replying to was doing exactly what you’re doing: responding to cited facts with pettiness. Any information that contradicts your opinions is met with mockery and moralizing judgment.

Well, I just showed you, per the CDC’s own numbers, that a third of those had nothing to do with Covid.

A reasonable person might then ask your question, but look for answers that involve something a little more intellectually rigorous than morally scolding strangers. For example: it’s seeming quite likely that our extreme, panicked reaction to this illness has killed a huge number of people.

How many more will die due to postponed cancer screenings, surgeries, and so on? How many children will be set back in their education, permanently? How many minority and low-income families will be carelessly tossed into generational poverty? How does that number weigh against the people who have died from this virus? Have you even given it a second thought?

But sure, go be “sad” about people sharing documented facts, instead. It’s much easier than critical thought, and it lets you feel morally superior. I can see why you prefer it.

> Almost no areas are seeing above-average utilization of hospital or ICU beds.

That's not really relevant to what I'm talking about, though. COVID-19 hospitalizations and ICU utilization (and deaths) are surging with the expected lag behind new cases, which wouldn't be expected if the new case surge was an illusion from, e.g., symptomatic colds leading people to get tested and discovering what would otherwise have passed as asymptomatic COVID-19 cases.

Whether the overall hospital or ICU utilization is seasonally high is a different issue.

I’m not arguing that there’s not a “case surge”. If you test everyone who walks in a hospital door (which we are), you’re going to find “cases”. If you did this with influenza, you’d find the same thing.

People go in to the ER for a broken leg, have a positive covid test, and get counted as a covid admission. This isn’t fiction: multiple state health departments have admitted it is happening. It’s too difficult to try to determine if Covid is “the reason” for an admission, so nobody tries.

Therefore, the only important question is: how are hospitals faring relative to any other year? And so far, the answer is that it looks like a moderately bad flu season. To hype the narrative that “hospitals are overwhelmed”, the news media routinely cherry-picks one or two hospitals, fixates on them for a week, then moves on to the next.

https://mobile.twitter.com/justin_hart/status/13277409970783...

Until very recently Turkey was only reporting symptomatic patients. After some pressure from healthcare unions they started reporting all positive cases.

That definitely would account for a big percentage of the near 4x jump. But there have been plenty of articles of Turkey's hospitals getting absolutely rammed and doctors saying it was nothing like it was in the old 'bad days' in April but far worse.

For a while Turkey was only reporting patients who needed treatment and not releasing the actual number of infected.

They were eventually shamed into being more forthcoming about the situation.

Spike in October was back to school in September and wide spread reopenings and increased activity associated with these. I have no data, but the correlation seemed strong and I can't figure out why everyone is scratching their heads about it. Puts me in the "change my mind" camp on this linkage.

14 day average case counts in my county are 10x what they were when school went back. But, we never went back to in-person schools for 99% of kids. Anecdotal, but it's certainly very possible for rates to go up even without in-person school.

No idea where you are. In US, things opened up and returned at such a rate the ripple effect is wide.

I do wonder if this is having some impact. The rate of hospitalizations are rising pretty fast along with the positive case rate in my state, though. The percentage of positive tests has climbed quite a bit as well.

Nationally, the number of deaths is going up pretty rapidly too.

Agreed

I don't think that can be the explanation, because deaths have also spiked.

flu season is pretty low as far as I've heard.

I don't have a lot of evidence only this and some articles I read last year about it being dead as soon as masks and social distancing came about

https://www.fox4news.com/news/cooks-childrens-hospital-repor...

I can't speak to a wide area, but where I live in the US, the flu is definitely not dead. Despite wearing a mask, keeping socially distance and basically not traveling except when essential, I caught type B of the flu, and my doctors told me they've had a shocking number of flu cases.

They seemed to expect to see fewer, too, but have observed the opposite.

> Seasonal influenza activity in the United States remains lower than usual for this time of year.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm

While not dead as GP expressed, there are notably fewer infections so far this year.

I'll probably start to use a mask every flu season.

That's fair. I didn't mean to imply things are exploding, though I guess it sounds like I did.

It just sounds like even doctors expected flu to be almost non-existent, but instead it seems ... oddly normal.

> Key Points

> Flu activity is unusually low at this time but may increase in the coming months.

How did you even get the flu.

That's a good point, my local pharmacist said that sales of cold and cough syrup has been down significantly, almost non existent, since our city has had lockdowns.

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