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Comment by jb775 | Hacker News Reader

Where's all the people that were saying Covid is a completely separate thing from the flu?...and every "Covid Death" was a separate death on top of the normal flu death rate?

Occam's Razor: Covid isn't a "pandemic", it's a strong flu

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If we're using the WHO definition of a pandemic it's a pandemic.

If we're using the dictionary definition of a pandemic "(of a disease) prevalent over a whole country or the world." it's a pandemic.

If we're using the colloquial definition of a pandemic "a disease that spreads around the world killing lots of people" it's a pandemic.

If you want you can consider seasonal flu on the list of pandemics, fine, but you're simply wrong to consider covid not a pandemic and if you are trying to downplay how deadly covid is I'd say you're behaving in an ethically wrong manner too.

It was a pandemic. It's finished in Europe. Numbers have been back to baseline for a while already.

https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/

It's not an influenza virus.

That said, even if it was, a "very strong flu" with global transmission and impact _is_ a pandemic -- see the 1918 Flu Pandemic.

The death rate in 2020 in the US also surpassed that during the 1918 pandemic.

What I think we've learned is that the same measures used to slow the spread of COVID-19 are staggeringly effective against the flu, and that we now know how to prepare for the next particularly aggressive influenza variant.

Covid is caused by a coronavirus, not an influenza virus. They have similar transmission methods and symptoms, but they are still different things. Like cats and dogs are both of similar size, both carnivores, both kept as pets and both can bite you, but they are still different kinds of animals.

And of-fucking-course it's a pandemic. What do you think that word means?

When does a pandemic end in your definition, as the numbers seem back to baseline in Europe at least?

It's almost universally accepted that covid-19 is separate from, and significantly more destructive than seasonal influenza viruses.

I don't think mainstream virologists and epidemiologists have changed their minds after the past year.

It's disappointing to see this type of misinformation being spread on HN. All you need to do is look at all-cause mortality in 2020 compared to previous years to easily disprove this:

https://i.imgur.com/z9RsQ8e.png

I haven't seen this before, thanks for sharing. Do you know the original source?

Not the Parent but the orignal numbers come form the CDC but I'm not sure where the graph is from. Here are links to the last two years of data, embedded in a comment I made on HN recently:

From the CDC: In 2019, a total of 2,854,838 resident deaths were registered in the United States—15,633 more deaths than in 2018. In 2020, approximately 3,358,814 deaths occurred in the United States (Table). The age-adjusted rate was 828.7 deaths per 100,000 population, an increase of 15.9% from 715.2 in 2019.

ref: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db395.htm https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7014e1.htm

Here is the one I look at (might need desktop version), https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

It was generated from the CDC data available here: https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html

It's not been a problem in a number of European countries.

https://oronu.wordpress.com/2021/01/29/mortality-statistics/

Scientists have sequenced the RNA for both covid and influenza, we know for a fact that they are completely different species of viruses.

Influenza is a specific thing. I'm not sure why you're trying to argue that COVID-19 is influenza when that's observably factually incorrect. Perhaps you're not aware that "the flu" is a specific thing and not just a way people say "people who get sick all at once from a thing"?

Covid is a completely separate thing from the flu, and this study shows that the excess death rate is not in fact on top of the normal flu, but that because of covid related precautions there were almost no flu deaths. So covid killed alot more people than the excess death rate would indicate.

Covid transmits the same way as flu but is more infectious.

Measures against Covid work against flu.

It’s nice to know that our flu deaths are declining. But our Covid deaths are many times more.

covid might not be more infectious, it might just be less people have any existing partial resistance to sars-cov-2. Each year the flu mutates but it still has overlap with prior variants.

As sars-cov-2 mutates seasonal covid might end up less bad than the seasonal flu. Though there is no way to tell.

That is likely to be true but doesn’t really mean anything.

Spanish flu killed millions before less deadly strains mutated and became what we now call flu.

I can’t advocate for any measure that kills millions in the short term, _especially_ without data for the long term.

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