Flu has disappeared worldwide during the Covid pandemic
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
The flu has a base reproduction number (R0) less than 2 (https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/coronavirus/2020/12/07/covid-19...). Covid has an R0 in the vicinity of 2.5 (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...).
In the meantime, public health measures like masking and distancing will work against both viruses. If people become reluctant to socialize because of covid (whether or not there be legal restrictions), they will also not spread the flu.
As a broad conclusion, if public health measures reduce the effective reproduction number of Covid to about 1 (stabilizing exponential growth), they will also reduce the effective reproduction number of the flu to something substantially below 1. Since the flu would have also had a low baseline prevalence in the summer of 2020, it is no wonder that we failed to see a flu season.
There's really no need for conspiracy theorizing.
Assuming that this is due to "masking and distancing" and the small difference in R0 is crude thinking. It's unlikely to be anything of the sort.
First, R0 is not a fixed constant. It varies by context and location, and we've seen influenza decline everywhere.
Second, R0 is an estimated value. There are big error bars on all of these estimates -- the overlap is far greater than the 0.5 you're using to claim causality.
Third, rhinovirus has not gone away (estimated R0 < 2). Nor has adenovirus (estimated R0 ~2.3) [1,2]
There's something far more interesting going on here, it is surprising, and it isn't a "conspiracy theory" to talk about it. It's science.
(FWIW, my current favored hypothesis is that the closure of schools, and possibly travel, significantly affected the spread of flu. Unlike Covid, kids are a significant vector of spread for influenza. It's one of those little facts about Covid that is...politically incorrect...to acknowledge right now. But I am speculating, and there are problems with this theory as well.)
[1] https://syndromictrends.com/metric/panel/rp/percent_positivi...
[2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.04.20020404v...
Given the reproduction number appears as the base of an exponent, I would not consider the difference "small."
If influenza has a typical R0 of about 2, reducing contacts by 50% would make its growth non-exponential. If covid has a typical R0 of about 2.5, doing the same would require a further 20% reduction of contacts, to 40% of baseline rather than 50%. Since population behaviour and legal restrictions have diminishing returns (eliminating casual contacts first at lower cost, then progressively higher-cost and more essential contacts), this could easily correspond to a large difference in effected (necessary) policy.
> Second, R0 is an estimated value. There are big error bars on all of these estimates -- the overlap is far greater than the 0.5 you're using to claim causality.
I have seen no credible evidence that typical (non-pandemic) influenza has an R0 greater than that of SARS-CoV-2. If you have a citation handy to the contrary, I'd be interested in seeing it. In the meantime, I tried to be generous in my estimation of influenza's R0; even your reference [2] places its central estimate at 1.68.
> Third, rhinovirus has not gone away (estimated R0 < 2). Nor has adenovirus (estimated R0 ~2.3) [1,2]
Rhinovirus and adenovirus both have mean-estimate R0 greater than that of influenza in your reference [2], so if policy is going to eliminate any of these disease from general circulation then influenza would be the first.
Furthermore, some analysis does show limited evidence of a reduction of rhinovirus cases (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03519-3). A confounding factor here, however, is that we don't really have comprehensive like-against-like monitoring for rhinovirus in the way developed nations monitor for influenza. Adenoviruses as a broad category are also not limited to respiratory transmission, so air-focused restrictions would have less effect on these other routes.
Finally, I reiterate that flu has a pronounced seasonal variation, whereas rhinovirus is somewhat less variable. A set of social responses only needs to prevent the flu season from starting to make it "disappear."
Kids are significant spreaders of both influenza and Covid (after school reopenings, in many countries kids become one of the top sources of inter-household Covid spread). They just tend to have mild or absent Covid symptoms and didn’t require regular testing for work etc., and therefore did not get consistently tested in most parts of the world. In some places parents deliberately avoided testing their kids for fear positive tests would interfere with their in-person schooling or extracurricular activities.
Repeated claims that kids don’t spread Covid were politically motivated and based largely on junk science.
Admittedly doing good studies was extremely difficult in places like the USA where spread was wildly out of control and contact tracing was completely overwhelmed.
1 is not normalized data. It does not account for testing frequency. These percentages are of tests using BioFire. My hospital, for example, does not use BioFire to test for SARS-CoV-2 and so we end up running BioFire much, much less frequently than during a normal year.
Anecdotally non-COVID respiratory infections in hospitalized patients have decreased dramatically. Working on trying to demonstrate this with data.
- More asymptomatic transmission of rhinovirus/enterovirus and adenoviruses than influenza. People often don't notice these illnesses, so wouldn't assume it is COVID and quarantine like they would for influenza.
- More fomite spread than influenza. They may be more stable on surfaces or in food
Was one nice perk having kids at home. 9 months of no illness.
6 weeks after going back family had Covid. No it’s back in the routine of mild illness at least monthly.
That seems a little denialist, honestly.
Children, in fact, have been hypothesized to be the primary reservoir for influenza.
The implication of this is that it would be much better to vaccinate all children against influenza rather than everybody else.
I feel like you constructed a straw man by snipping this out from the parent comment:
> work against both viruses. If people become reluctant to socialize because of covid (whether or not there be legal restrictions), they will also not spread the flu.
You can socialize from 6 feet and with a mask. I took the parent to include staying home in their assessment and I have no clue why anyone would think otherwise. It's peak social distancing.
From the CDCs tips for social distancing:
> Choose Safe Social Activities: It is possible to stay socially connected with friends and family who don’t live in your home by calling, using video chat, or staying connected through social media.
You say "unlike covid". Maybe I'm biased because half of my family was infected with covid by a 6 year old(everyone's fine now) . Also here in Poland all 3 of our covid "waves" came few weeks after kids went back to schools (no masks are required at schools here, because feelings). It is obvious kids at schools are a very significant spread factor second only to spread at the workplace (also no need for masks at the workplace for some stupid reason unless you are public facing).
It is infuriating that tens of thousands of people have to die, because idiot politicians make policy based on stupid factors. For example, it would be inconvenient for everyone at workplaces to have to wear masks so let's tell them to ensure desks are 1.5m apart and everything is fine despite the fact they are not. There was even a local study done recently that estimated 40% of all covid cases were infected at the workplace. This info was major news for few days, then nothing changed and everyone forgot about it.
Also, the pinnacle of stupid (bordering on malice - hopefully it will be prosecuted eventually) is making covid treatment policy based on expected drug availability not on what works. It has been proved recently(9th of April) in Lancet corticosteroids given early on lower the incidence of hospitalisation a lot. However, despite many letters from the public "official medical guidelines" in PL still say the exact opposite using an irrelevant study as justification.
* The study is irrelevant because they measured efficacy of those steroids on people that are already hospitalised,it found no impact on death rate of already intubated people. The study authors also extrapolated their research of hospitalised intubated people to people pre-hospitalisation and for some reason wrote in their abstract corticosteroids given early actually have detrimental effect (no proof of this assumption in their study whatsoever).
Then the second study comes out that measures efficacy of (inhaled) corticosteroids in real early covid patients.It finds it significantly lowers development of symptoms that require hospitalisation. Everyone ignores it. Meanwhile we have over 80 thousand "extra" deaths in a country one tenth the size of US.
Oh, and my claim is that people making decisions on covid policy are perfectly aware of their wrongdoing because transcripts of their meetings are mysteriously unavailable.
The idea that the flu just 'disappeared' despite world trade continuing just sets off my bullshit detectors. Between all the countries that did little or nothing initially, and the people who refused to wear masks and didn't lock down...there's just no way it dropped to zero. Less? Sure. But gone? I simply don't believe it.
That explains all these news stories telling me what to expect:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/experts-warn-twindemic-...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/09/19/covid-...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-we-can-avoid-...
etc:
https://www.google.com/search?q=twindemic&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:9...
1. A high number of COVID cases and a high number of flu cases.
2. A high number of COVID cases but low number of flu cases.
3. A low number of COVID cases and a low number of flu cases.
If flu and COVID were independent, there would be a fourth potential outcome (high flu cases and low COVID cases). Majromax is saying that it was largely predictable that this fourth outcome would not happen.
The thing that the news articles are warning about is outcome #1 which, if it had transpired, probably would have been quite bad. Note that the experts in the articles are warning about something that could happen, not saying that it will definitely happen. And the reason it didn't happen is at least in part due to the warnings that were issued.
I don't want to assume bad intentions on your part but I'm not really sure what you want us to conclude from these posts... elaborate?
It's a simple question. Flu deaths in the US have dropped precipitously. This past flu season resulted in (very roughly) ~1% of the deaths of previous seasons. It seems obvious that this is primarily due to social distancing efforts as you say. To naive little me, this implies that COVID deaths are also likely to have been reduced to ~1% from what they would have been without said measures. In the US, that implies that we may have steered into 500K deaths instead of a stunning potential 50M deaths.
Based on my admittedly naive calculations, I'm sure this is inaccurate, but I don't even know in which direction, could have been potentially even more. Did we really avert 50M deaths by social distancing?
Looking at two weeks:
- Week of December 5, 2020: 40/22,474 flu tests were positive
- Week of December 7, 2019: 631/1,508 flu tests were positive
Cumulative #s:
- Cumulative through Week 14 2021: 1,739/891,717
- Cumulative through Week 14 2019: 37,155/69,291
So we've been testing wayyy more often with wayyy fewer positives.
It was literally so stupid that it took me a minute or two to understand that the implication was that conspiracy theorists think flu cases were being categorized as covid.
The dynamics of influenza could have been expected to change, and I would have put money on they decreasing, but it is never the less not pre-ordained nor attributable to an obvious cause (for example, one of the original reasons people didn't push mask orders is the limited suggestion that they were effective for flu).
Yeah but there are numerous studies that show these things don't work. Also, I'm confused why you think someone cannot get both covid-19 and the flu.
This argument does not make sense because of the timing of the disappearance of the flu.
For example, NYS was having a really bad flu season before the Covid panic hit[1]. I am posting a link to my screenshot first because NYS flu tracker[1] is one of the stupidest web pages out there. Click on the "compare with previous seasons" heading on the page to get the current table.
The noteworthy part is the drop in flu cases between the 6th and 7th weeks during what seems like an exceptionally bad flu season.
Note also "Regulation for Prevention of Influenza Transmission by Healthcare and Residential Facility and Agency Personnel"[3]:
> As of December 5, 2019, influenza is prevalent in NYS.
> At this time, Section 2.59 of the New York State Sanitary Code (10 NYCRR § 2.59) requires all health care and residential facilities and agencies regulated pursuant to Article 28, 36, or 40 of the Public Health Law to ensure that all personnel, as defined in the regulation, not vaccinated against influenza for the current influenza season wear a surgical or procedure mask while in areas where patients or residents are typically present.
> This page will be updated when the status changes.
which apparently has not been updated since December 5, 2019.
[1]: https://twitter.com/sinan_unur/status/1368882698966667265
[2]: https://nyshc.health.ny.gov/web/nyapd/new-york-state-flu-tra...
[3]: https://www.health.ny.gov/diseases/communicable/influenza/se... (archived <https://archive.is/wde1c>)
For these places, we would expect the flu to continue on as normal. Instead it’s disappeared.
How strange.
It sounds more like poor data reporting more than anything else and I will take that to my grave.
In fact, real science has a tendency to be viewed (by non-scientists, it should go without saying) as conspiracy theory insofar as it challenges the official narrative, and invokes complicated explanations, rather than a nice simple answer.
No flu, no stomach viruses, absolutely nothing for more than a year now. Thankfully no covid-19 either.
I'm not sure which practices I'll continue, but its definitely shown me that I have wayyyy more control over my health than I previously thought.
Curious what others think are the most effective continued practices. Seems like social distancing isn't super reasonable, but maybe continuing to wear a mask in crowded places?
Continuing to wash your hands often and avoid touching your face (especially after touching things in public like door handles, elevator buttons, etc.) probably would help as well.
Agree that social distancing isn't really practical outside of the current situation.
But really, there are just a lot of things that you won't be able to avoid, at least not unless you want to stay at home more often than you used to rather than venturing out. Conference rooms at an office, crowded public areas, public transit, even lining up at a popular takeout restaurant... all of these things make it easier to pick up something from someone else, as virus particles in water droplets can linger in the air for quite some time.
1) Almost never eat out. Home cooked meals that I've prepped / washed. This was single handedly the biggest factor that completely removed "getting sick" from my life.
2) Hand wash before touching face, or food.
3) Avoid sick people. If I hear someone coughing or sneezing, I move away from them. Call me a germ freak, I don't care, I've had 0 sick days in 6+ years since I started taking these simple precautions.
You don't even need to social distance... just avoid people if they're sick. SOME of this is impossible (on an air plane for example). Turns out, I very rarely travel so have likely just gotten lucky avoiding the dip shits that fly while sick.
I really hope the long term effect of this will be huge social stigma against being in public with a contagious illness.
I usually get two or three colds and one or two flus a year. In the past fourteen months, not a sniffle.
Maybe in a couple more generations of improvement of telepresence we can mostly eradicate infectious disease. Next up: We each get a nutrient bath and direct hook-up.
Literally nothing.
While it is nice, I would definitely trade it for my kids to have normal social lives again.
If anything should come out of this pandemic, it should be Americans following basic hygiene. And I mean - basic. Hand sanitizer should be at every table.
My SO has a very strong emetophobia and she is very, very clear to not touch any food without having washed her hands very good. Even at home. I learned a lot from her and have not been sick for ages. I also don't eat out in flu season. I just don't. I worked in gastronomy during my time at university. I know why I (at least in flu season) just don't eat out. as long as people need to earn money and don't get sick pay, people go to work when sick. At least I did during financially desparate times. So I don't blame the people doing it at all - I just don't buy food from them.
Like you sit there with an attitude, but in the kitchen you cant see your food was cooked on an unclean grill
If it makes you feel superior or better, go ahead.
I wash my hands, and yet no doubt my phone and computer keyboard are filthy.
There are ways to keep those surfaces relatively clean; I use a screen protector of my iPad and a keyboard "skin" on the laptop, so they can tolerate a bit of regular washing. In the past I have simply used sunlight - 10 minutes of high desert UV will knock out most bugs. But I haven't kept up with that as much this year.
Ugh. Signing off, gong to wash hands...
> How do they measure such things?
By have a sophisticated surveillance network and testing people. To quote from the above page, there have been 931,726 specimens collected since 9/2020, and only 0.2% have been positive.
Compare that number to the previous season (13.0%):
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/weeklyarchives2019-2020/Week0...
So the data is there :-)
See this for an example of the work involved in the UK: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
It's kinda the same math that hardware stores use to figure out how many shovels to stock in a given store each week. Nothing is a mystery if you have data.
Because people outside the US actually see their doctors when they get sick? Or people who are otherwise older/younger/immunocompromised etc.
Don't just assume that everyone is a young healthy person like yourself.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5489283/
[2]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...
"Only people who get tested for influenzalike illnesses—typically about 5 percent of individuals who fall ill—are tallied."
If there were a change in the way these tests were administered, for example a blaring medical bias toward another disease, that would present a significant sampling problem. That same statistician also wanted me to mention the simplest and most boring answers are usually closest to the truth.
There could be other explanations, such as: a desire to avoid Covid causes people to avoid seeking treatment, so more flu cases self resolve. OR: a fear of Covid causes more people to get tested when they're sick, and some of them may then go for flu testing before they would otherwise after coming back negative for Covid...?
Seems like the simplest answer is just "actions that have reduced the spread of one disease have also reduced the spread of another, that's historically less widespread already."
Do you have a link to someone alleging this for covid? I'm worried this is spin that you picked up from a source that has an interest in opposition to covid mitigation practices.
The (let's face it, silly) notion that masks and distancing suppressed all respiratory pathogens except one is a theory with very little traction, and which will almost certainly not stand up to serious scrutiny.
Are you familiar with the concept of "R0" and that one virus may be more transmissible than another?
Flu has an R0 of about 1.5, and whatever covid's is, it's higher (last I saw was 2.5).
If we postulate that masking and distancing and similar measures act to reduce these numbers across the board, say by 0.6, that brings flu down to 0.9 and covid to 1.9. Outbreaks don't tend to stay around when their R0 is below 1, which would explain why there's hardly any flu this year and plenty of covid.
Source: I was trained as a mathematical biologist and did a bunch of work with compartmental models: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidem...
In this admittedly over-simplified model, beta is (per wiki) "the average number of contacts per person per time, multiplied by the probability of disease transmission in a contact between a susceptible and an infectious subject".
Social distancing reduces the average number of contacts, masking reduces the probability of transmission, and both act to reduce beta. You reduce beta, you reduce R0, you win.
At the end of the day it’s likely gonna be the result of a combination of all these factors.
Educating people and encouraging them to wear masks 100%, but let's not start mandating anything new, or levying new fines that we have already seen be disproportionately used against over policed groups. Studies show that education and awareness works just as well as state intervention.
Before this year people would still go to work when sick, parents would still let their kids blow out the candles on a cake, everyone at the big event would kiss the same cheeks, etc.
Some societies in Asia have been doing that for quite sometime.
In theory, yes; in practice, I don't see this happening for some time (outside of a possible combined SARS-CoV-2 booster + flu combo). The mRNA vaccines are expensive to produce, and it's hard to justify a cost multiplier that's a magnitude higher & harder to produce. Flu vaccines are already multi-strain, and the current techniques already attempt to generate the recombinant strains that might be generated in the wild. Flu mutates faster than the current egg based vaccine production pipeline can handle, and the mRNA vaccine pipeline is orders of magnitude smaller in scale. This will change, of course.
And mRNA can keep up with flu. It can also target things in a more deliberate way, if I understand it. So a protein could be selected that is common to many variants and hard for the virus to do without.
That doesn’t seem possible, unless you can get birds and pigs to mask up.
That would reduce the spread of infectious diseases even with schools open as normal.
Unless I'm reading that chart wrong it seems like flu went away but viruses that cause cold like symptoms stuck around.
If masks/etc was super effective wouldn't you expect those to go down with influenza?
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56483445
Coronavirus: How the common cold can boot out Covid
Think of the cells in your nose, throat and lungs as being like a row of houses. Once a virus gets inside, it can either hold the door open to let in other viruses, or it can nail the door shut and keep its new home to itself.
Influenza is one of the most selfish viruses around, and nearly always infects alone. Others, such as adenoviruses, seem to be more up for a houseshare.
If rhinovirus and Sars-CoV-2 were released at the same time, only rhinovirus is successful. If rhinovirus had a 24-hour head start then Sars-CoV-2 does not get a look in. And even when Sars-CoV-2 had 24-hours to get started, rhinovirus boots it out.
"Sars-CoV-2 never takes off, it is heavily inhibited by rhinovirus," Dr Pablo Murcia told BBC News.
He added: "This is absolutely exciting because if you have a high prevalence of rhinovirus, it could stop new Sars-CoV-2 infections."
Viruses are not identical.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinovirus
> They are lytic in nature and are among the smallest viruses, with diameters of about 30 nanometers. By comparison, other viruses, such as smallpox and vaccinia, are around ten times larger at about 300 nanometers, while flu viruses are around 80–120 nm.
Different virus sizes, different mask effectiveness.
Anecdotally, my kids are in middle school, and every winter we get several colds. None this year.
Many cold-like viruses infect mucous membranes (you have a number over your body). A glancing touch is enough to be infected.
I know someone who works for a company who produces such tests at the same cost as a single test today, but often insurance companies and providers don't know how to bill for them, so you see stories in the news about "irresponsible doctors who should never have ordered 20 tests" that were really a single test billed incorrectly.
Not sure how much this affects rhe stats. Practically no cases of influenza are recorded, though.
Sanitation and "social distancing" work for flu, but coronavirus is mainly about ventilation.
This was also a problem with the flu: they were always estimates.
I prefer to look at excess all cause mortality (per 100 inhabitants) or z-index to get a grip on the size/movement of this pandemic. Most developed nations keep track of deaths very well.
US: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=l...
Interesting to see the graph starting to drop dramatically in early 2020 after a decade of growth/high numbers.
I've always had clean thick long blonde hair, which happens to be lice's favourite hair type. Every time there was a lice outbreak in school, I got it. Its very much a thing in Canada still.
However my nasal swab PCR test, taken 48 hours after symptoms, came back negative. I assumed it was flu, but everything I'm read suggests that flu is virtually unheard of this season. For a standard cold, it seemed to severe (102 F fever, body aches and chills). I also had a strong reaction to the first Covid vaccine dose. What's the most likely explanation here?
If you test positive, you likely had it and can spread it. If you test negative, there is about a 40% of a false negative, but it also depends on when you were exposed, so you'll end up negative if you are outside the window... post symptom, you were probably outside the window.
This also depends on the test itself. When I got mine, I went to a place that was using a new form of the test, and it was bad enough that the testing company lost their contract (whether they were fudging numbers or not is debatable, I can't find any good information on it either).
At the end of the day, if you didn't go to a hospital and get diagnosed with covid, or had an antibody test after you recovered, you probably can't be certain.
Sorry, it's the best I could come up with after days of looking it up from multiple sources.
One of the most ridiculous example: the Thai government went to the extent of spraying disinfectant in the forest next to the Burmese border, and got pictures published in newspaper to show their great work. Comical! [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/thainewsreports/status/13819185863488225...
Yes, but it must have had some effect on fomite transmission of some viruses, right?
This makes a lot of sense. Schools have been surprisingly rare causes of COVID outbreaks, but are constant epicenters for flu outbreaks.
That is, as a parent, I was far less prone to sickness before I had kids of school age. From all I have ever heard, I am far from unique in that.
I give it 5 years from now when it is no longer politically intolerable that studies will come out and admit that masks and social distancing did absolutely nothing to slow or prevent infection.
Obviously personal action is harder to reproduce than government-sponsored trucks, so it's less useful if it was a main cause.
Edit: if you downvote, please, comment why. I could be wrong, so would love to know your arguments.
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-stanford-masks/fac...
The author lied about his affiliation with Stanford, and the paper was retracted.
> Jonathan Davis, a spokesperson for Elsevier, told Reuters via email that Medical Hypotheses has since retracted the article after concluding it was misleading due to “a broader review of existing scientific evidence” showing that masks “are an effective prevention of COVID-19 transmission” and said that the article contained several misquotes and unverified data. Davis said that the author himself had submitted the affiliation with Stanford Medicine.
> As reported here by Forbes, Medical Hypotheses has previously published articles such as “Is there an association between the use of heeled footwear and schizophrenia” (here) and “Ejaculation as a potential treatment of nasal congestion in mature males” (here).
There's a reason it's titled "Medical Hypotheses".
Here's some quality sources:
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118?fbclid=IwAR0j...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666142X2...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.12.20173047v...
Remains to be seen I guess, but this prognosis resonated with me.
[1] https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/sunday/audio/20187...
Local doctors in my City (Canberra) told multiple people I've talked with that the extra protective steps taken last year meant our bodies weren't as well positioned to handle the standard flu when we caught it.
If you subtract baseline mortality from actual mortality to get excess mortality, that's often a better estimate of the casualties from pandemic, famine and war than the death certificates for every person who died.
Excess mortality in most countries shows that Covid deaths are significantly under-reported.
And if there are fewer deaths from flu, and fewer from suicide [1], then excess mortality itself is under-reported and Covid killed even more than we thought.
[1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/04/08/defying-expectations-...
Year/Cause of death 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 Total deaths 2712630 2744248 2813503 2839205 2854838 3358814 Heart disease 633842 635260 647457 655381 659041 690882 Cancer 595930 598038 599108 599274 599601 598932 COVID-19 345323 Unintentional injuries 146571 161374 169936 167127 173040 192176 Stroke 140323 142142 146383 147810 150005 159050 Chronic lower respiratory diseases 155041 154596 160201 159486 156979 151637 Alzheimer disease 110561 116103 121404 122019 121499 133382 Diabetes 79535 80058 83564 84946 87647 101106 Influenza and pneumonia 57062 51537 55672 59120 49783 53495 Kidney disease 49959 50046 50633 51386 51565 52260 Suicide 44193 44965 47173 48344 47511 44834
In any case there were a couple peaks in the USA where deaths from all causes were 25% higher than average.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-raw-deat...
The majority of covid deaths are those that on average had very few months left to live. There is a likely a high chance these people were going to die to the next "flu" that came around.
How do you account for this? It seems like adding flu deaths on top of covid is incorrect - both would only have a subset of people that are going to die from it, and while covid's is probably more than the flu (depending on the flu strain - we've had some pretty bad flu years), since they both share the same pool I don't think you can add flu deaths in.
On top of that, we had a relatively light flu season preceding covid. This would also need to somehow be accounted for, but I'm not sure how. There was likely a "dry tinder" effect.
And yet the medical establishment in the US has continued to push the flu vaccine on everyone. I can only assume that this over-zealousness helps the anti-vaccine movement.
BTW, the flu death stats quoted in this article are mostly from pneumonia rather than influenza [1]
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
In this paper, in 2008, researchers observe and conjecture a number of things that we now know also apply to SARS-Cov-2:
* The long-tailed distribution of R: Few infect many
* A low secondary attack (household infection) rate of 20-30%
* 'Asymptomatic' infection as opposed to sick-to-well infection
Contrariwise this (beside basic humanity) is why the current out of control situation in India or Brazil is everyone's problem. High absolute prevalence means events that are one in a billion chance get to happen. And spread.
Covid sounded a lot scarier to them, so in the process of avoiding it, they accidentally did the right thing. Thus the drop in flu cases.
EDIT: The PCR test quote was fact checked and deemed to be misleading, but it still sounds like they are not very accurate [0].
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-pcr-idUSKBN2442...
The relevant quotes from Kary are:
"With PCR, if you do it well, you can find almost anything, in anybody"
"If you can amplify one single molecule up to something that you can really measure - which PCR can do - then there's just.. very few molecules that you don't have at least one single one of them in your body"
"It doesn't tell you that you're sick"
My interpretation is that Kary Mullis did believe it was at least possible to "misinterpret" the results of a PCR test. It doesn't seem such a stretch to believe that you could be sick with the flu, while also having a single molecule of a coronavirus gene present in your nasal cavity (triggering a positive coronavirus test).
Note: I know this is an inflammatory topic. The views of Kary Mullis are not necessarily my own. I am posting this here because I think it is interesting.
Some people may also be worried that they do have covid (or will get a false positive), and don't want to get a positive test due to quarantine requirements, embarrassment, etc.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-nears-end-of...
On the other hand PCR test are not inaccurate at all, at least regarding false positives. There are detailed articles and even Youtube videos on the process and if you take a look, you will understand why it's quite accurate.
In essence, they create a reaction that will mass produce specific parts of the virus gene until it's detectable with a sensor. They run the reaction multiple times and then the sensor looks for luminance if I recall correctly.
Because you can't accidentally produce Covid-19 genes, the tests are very accurate. However, you might not get enough virus material when taking the sample from the patient(which can fail your reaction or you might need more cycles than usual to create a detectable amount) or it could be the case that there's a mutation in the gene that you are attempting to multiply, therefore you can get a negative test for an infected person.
https://covidlive.com.au/report/positive-test-rate
A Lancet article cited below references a paper that estimates much worse specificity of PCR tests for SARS-CoV-2 based on the specificity of tests for other RNA viruses (original SARS, MERS, influenza, etc.):
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.26.20080911v...
But why would anyone do that, when we have direct experience with the actual test for the actual virus?
Of course the false positive rate in heavily-affected areas may be higher, due to sample contamination--with more true positive patients, there's more opportunity for one true-positive patient to contaminate multiple samples. But such cross-contamination can occur frequently only if there are actually lots of true positive patients.
For another sanity check, the sensitivity of antibody tests is established on a sample of patients who tested positive by PCR, who are assumed to all be true-positive. So any PCR false-positive among those patients will show up as an antibody false-negative, so that bounds the apparent sensitivity of those antibody tests. But antibody tests show sensitivity around 85%:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
So even if the antibody tests were perfect, at most 15% of their positive sample was false-positive. (Note that this is a different quantity from the PCR specificity, and can't be translated into such without knowing the true prevalence in the population that the sample was drawn from.) Of course the antibody tests also aren't perfect, and I'd guess that 15% is almost entirely antibody false-negatives rather than PCR false-positives.
You can also compare reported COVID deaths (which are generally established by PCR) with year-over-year excess mortality. The agreement isn't perfect, but it's pretty close.
The vast majority of patients who test positive by PCR are or were infected by the virus. That's a different question from whether a positive test indicates the presence of replication-competent virus (i.e., whether the patient could infect others right now), since RNA from dead virus can trigger the positive too; but that dead virus had to come from somewhere.
Between the flu and covid, case reporting numbers are wildly unreliable.
One might ask, what incentives are there to over report a given illness at any given time?
This doesn't appear to be happening. Instead, "the drop-off in flu numbers was both swift and universal." (article quote)
This universality suggests a data problem to me rather than an environmental change.
Perhaps we should continue this way.
I'm only prepared to continue with #3 and I hope Covid will encourage more people to get annual flu shots. Beyond that, I'm rolling the dice.
I'm surprised I'm still alive...
Another way to see it is that people who’d die from the flu died from Covid instead.
How do we tease apart the two potential explanations?
If the same covid PCR test existed a few years back most flu/cold would have been classified as Covid.
This is the reason doctors know flu is not present, because they are not getting those cases they got every year in Winter.
Flu is the main medical issue in Autumn-Winter in most of the North hemisphere by quantity.
This is a serious question and not an attempt at rhetoric. I really am curious. Was flu never a problem in Florida? Was voluntary compliance so widespread that heavy handed government policy had no marginal anti-flu effect? Something else?
In other words, you can probably beat back the flu significantly by having enough of the population mask up, wash/sanitize their hands, etc.
I personally dislike the isolation of extreme car culture, but it does help in situations like this.
In Massachusetts, usage is certainly higher, but maybe in practicality, not enough to make a difference compared to other factors?
Where are you getting this take? Life in the US in 2020 is dramatically different than it was in 2019.
This isn't really true anywhere, some places had fewer state mandated restrictions, but effectively everywhere had significant changes in terms of breadth and depth of person-to-person contacts.
Queues at popular sites were socially distanced outdoors as well.
Also, the whole hand-sanitiser-everywhere thing, while in retrospect probably not super effective against covid, would be expected to be quite effective for the flu.
2. Having flu outside your border be rarer means less flu coming in.
Asymptomatic spread is a much larger risk with COVID-19 compared to the flu. A simple behavior change of "If I feel sick, I don't go to work/school/grocery shopping" isn't enough to stop COVID, but could cut flu spread a ton by itself.
Also, there were probably minor restrictions people took upon themselves, like staying home when they had flu-like symptoms, or shunning people that coughed.
On the other hand, this patterns very neatly with previously observed and well-documented phenomena of viral interference, specifically with respect to influenza. Here's a good paper to start a journey of research on this topic: https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/212/11/1690/2911897
1) most flu cases are being mislabeled as covid
2) most people who have a mild flu are not going to the doctor
3) the easiest way to test this will be when covid goes away and the flu suddenly reappears.
I think you are mixing up half-facts. People were saying that deaths with co-factors were being lumped as covid related deaths and different countries were classifying things differently for political reasons. No one is mislabeling the flu as covid and not giving you a covid test to detect the strain.
s/b
The public health measures that slow the spread of the novel coronavirus work really well on FANG earnings.
Secondly it hasn't disappeared, if you read the article it says there were 600 flu deaths (in the US) last year, where previously there were 20,000+.
Finally, all it takes is a quick test to confirm whether it's influenza or coronavirus.
The headline is hyperbolic (the article says it’s dropped to “minuscule levels”) but it’s entirely possible to determine that by sampling a small portion of the population.
Having testable traces of Covid-19 in your septum is not the same thing as having Covid-19 the symptomatic disease. But it's statistically treated the same.
Flu cases have dropped because people aren't being tested for it. If health authorities instructed populations to get flu tests as aggressively as covid-19 tests, flu cases would jump again. Not complicated guys.