The impact of this effect changes if has-flu and has-covid are correlated, but it's still there unless it's a 100% correlation.
I had bad flu last year and because of home working, I went back to "work" once I reached the number of days after which I needed a doctor's note. In normal times I'd have gone to the doctor to get a sick note rather than infect my colleagues.
These form the basis of overall infection estimates. If you are interested in the methodology of those estimates, here is the CDC overviews, complete with citations for the primary research that informed the creation of their models: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/how-cdc-estimates.htm#e...
> 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 :-)
It's not being tested for because they are prioritizing COVID-19 testing, unless your hospitalized.
https://www.660citynews.com/2021/04/13/zero-cases-of-seasona...
https://www.albertahealthservices.ca/influenza/Page14481.asp...
**Please note for all dashboards that as of March 12, community samples are no longer being routinely tested for non-COVID respiratory pathogens including flu.
And if you look at the 2020 - 2021 dashboard
https://www.albertahealthservices.ca/influenza/influenza.asp...
You'll see they don't have any test information for Influenza.
I may be misunderstanding this as it is hard to make sense how the governments statistics show no testing and that news article you mentioned with the chief medical officer for the province saying otherwise.
And that they at least show non zero results for past years.
Before covid hospitals, and doctors, didn't test for the flu viruses. Maybe in severe cases?
I know for certain private practice doctors didn't. All you saw was a chart on the wall differentiating a cold, from the flu.
In the USA, the government tries to target the upcoming flu vaccine, but is usually wrong on the strain.
Personally, I think Americans have been dying for years of SAR viruses, and the government has been blaming the flu virus?
We had a family Thanksgiving in my grandmother's house in '98. My sister brought her two very sick kids to the holliday. By the next morning (12-16 hrs after exposure) we were all sick, with the exception of my brother. 5 people who never felt so sick in their lives. I could't even muster the energy to take my slacks off before dropping into bed. 7 days later my grandmother died. I was always under the impression the incubation period was longer than a half day? Whatever that virus was, I will never forget it for a lot of reasons. And of course, my grandmothers cause of death was "complications of the flu", and probally should have been on a respirator, and not sent home so soon?
This is simply false.
https://www.modernhealthcare.com/patients/providers-switchin...
> In 2018, providers completed between 35 million and 40 million flu tests in the U.S., including RIDTs that use immunoassay technology and molecular tests, flu testing company executives said.
Anecdotally, my kids' pediatrician does them any time flu-like symptoms are present. Same for strep tests. Both have rapid, in-practice tests that require just a swab.
See this for an example of the work involved in the UK: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
From the article:
"the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated there were roughly 22,000 deaths in the prior season and 34,000 two seasons ago." -- emphasis added
I can imagine that many others in my situation would come to a similar conclusion.
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.
Just put all that into some simple regression models and you probably get a fairly good estimate.
The trickiest thing is figuring out how out of stock you are. How many shovels would you have sold if you hadn't run out of stock. So usually you have to be more careful with data points when you might have not registered customers that didn't get what they want in your store.
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.
I am not sure what your point is with the assuming everyone is healthy. No one is saying that the flu can’t be deadly. The entire thread is about how you calculate how many people got the flu in a year. Some people suffer severe symptoms from the flu, go to the doctor, and are recorded in the statistics as having had the flu. Many people, however, don’t have bad enough symptoms and therefore don’t go to the doctor and are not tracked in the statistics as having had the flu.
The question is how do they figure out the actual rates when a large portion of cases are never recorded.
What does my own health or the fact that the flu kills many people have to do with that question?
The definition for a flu epidemic is two standard deviations above the expected cases for influenza that year, as estimated by a Serfling-type regression model using a negative binomial distribution.
Influenza just doesn't breach that barrier for more than a few weeks most years, and rarely in widespread geographic areas at once.
Compare that to SARS-CoV-2, where the expected number of cases is zero.
"Epidemic" means something more than "Lots".
You can have very serious endemic diseases - malaria is one example. But "Occurring to a level above expected" is an important piece of information all its own - for example, five cases of Smallpox, while only five cases, is something of an emergency, whereas five cases of influenza is not a serious crisis.
That's all based on the people who would use the technical definition.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/22/science/flu-s...
My wife is also an ER doctor and agrees that there were times that they didn't perform many/any flu tests--mostly in the spring of 2020 and after none of the flu tests were returning positive for a while. But this past winter people have definitely been tested for the flu. Rapid influenza tests are also usually performed first, only sending to labs when confirmatory testing is desired.