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> I agree with you that there are people who cavalierly dismiss the dangers of covid.

Don't call it the flu. It's not the flu. It's killed 20x more people than the flu even in the fact of pervasive society-changing mitigation strategies (all while the flu itself has all but gone extinct, remember! All that masking and distance learning actually worked!). It's not the flu.

Beyond that, nitpick with my phrasing all you like. This is HN, after all.

It's not the flu.

> All that masking and distance learning actually worked!

Across US states, there is no correlation, let alone causation, between stringency of masks/social distancing/lockdown and outcome.

I'm curious what you're citing here. I've actually seen lots and lots of charts that show the opposite. Are you maybe thinking of some of the non-scientific arguments that included the initial (extremely large) March 2020 outbreak in NYC in the "mask wearing" bucket, despite the fact that almost all those infections occurred before the lockdown?

Here is the quiz the sibling comment is probably referring to:

https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/

I don't have anything offhand anymore, it's more from a variety of sources over the whole past year. But from what I've seen most people cite, and the way you mentioned NYC, I'm guessing the charts you've seen are single location over time, rather than results across comparable locations (which is what I'm remembering - one example, months ago there was a test someone made for fun that showed you case/death outcome curves for various comparable locations and you had to pick out which one(s) did or did not have measures taken. I didn't save the link and have been looking for it on and off since then, but haven't been able to find it).

The problem with those one-location-over-time ones is that quite often people don't take into account the incubation period and testing delay - for example, in Illinois cases started dropping the day stricter lockdowns went into effect Nov last year, which means it wasn't the stricter lockdown that did it because the effects of the lockdowns would've taken 2-3 weeks to show up in the numbers.

Not disagreeing that Covid19 is a much more lethal disease, can you point to some reference that compares covid death to flu related death (prior to covid).

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html

Worst season in recent memory was 61k deaths among influenza patients. Last year saw 600k americans die of covid.

Meanwhile flu fatalities cratered due to the pandemic response. Full data isn't available yet, but this site has some details (e.g. pediatric flu deaths dropped between 37x and 199x -- there was ONE child who died of the flu last year):

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm

Meanwhile flu fatalities cratered due to the pandemic response.

That's not at all clear. Different areas have had vastly different levels of response to Covid, but the flu disappeared everywhere. So either minimal levels of non-pharmaceutical interventions are sufficient to virtually eradicate the flu, or something else is going on. Viral interference seems likely: https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/31/a-viral-mystery-can-one-...

No, it's 100% true. Flu deaths are just data. You can't argue with data. You're engaging in excuse-making to try to rule out the most obvious hypothesis for the enormous drop in deaths. You can't deny that it happened.

And while such excuses do exist, they don't represent consensus opinions anywhere. Those who believe them are essentially 1:1 with those who want to believe that covid "is only as bad as the flu", which is provably false.

> Worst season in recent memory was 61k deaths among influenza patients. Last year saw 600k americans die of covid.

Those aren't directly comparable because the various flus have been circulating for years/decades and people have died all across that time. While people do have cross-immunity with sars-cov-2 and other coronaviruses, sars-cov-2 is new so it's hitting those decades of people all at once.

The currently estimated IFR across all age groups is around 0.15%, putting it on-par with the flu (something like 0.07% IIRC; this one is hard to pin down because there's a lot of different flus). And in the past few months, cases have spiked without a spike in deaths all over the place, so that 0.15% is probably going to drop more, especially with indications that the Delta variant is more infections but less serious. (That said the effect the past few months could be the effect of the vaccines; it's not clear to me if that's supposed to affect the estimated IFR or that estimation is for a vulnerable population (but I'm not sure how you could estimate a vulnerable population for one that's been around for a while, so I think it does still count))

> The currently estimated IFR across all age groups is around 0.15%, putting it on-par with the flu

Yeah, that's gonna need one hell of a cite. This is false.

The OP correct about best estimates for IFR at a global level, and you shouldn't be dismissing the number out-of-hand.

The difficulty with "global average IFR" is that it neglects the massive variation in IFR by age. This Nature paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0

made an attempt to break down the IFR by demographic, and found an almost 100,000-fold difference between the youngest and the oldest groups:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0/figures/2

As such, the "IFR" for a country is going to vary dramatically with the age of the population. It isn't particularly meaningful to talk about IFR as a single number, but it's decidedly true that for anyone under 60, the risk of death is measured in fractions of a percent.

For those under 25, the risk is measured in thousandths of a percent.

Here you go: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33768536/

> Acknowledging residual uncertainties, the available evidence suggests average global IFR of ~0.15% and ~1.5-2.0 billion infections by February 2021 with substantial differences in IFR and in infection spread across continents, countries and locations.

Good grief. I don't even have to click on that to know you've misinterpreted or the paper is garbage. We've measured 600k US deaths (with a real count somewhat higher, excess death metrics usually overshoot that by 20-30%)? You'd need 400M+ Americans to even make that work. What's the contention here, magic unmeasured multiple infections? People dying more than once?

So, OP provided a high-quality source, and you're ignoring it without reading it, because you know it's wrong? Without reading it. Is that right?

Yes, that's exactly right. It can only be true if there were 400M US covid infections. There are only 330M americans. I'll put my basic math skills up against any "high quality source" with a claim this ridiculous. The IFR is just plain not 0.15%. Period. That value is simply wrong. Or the paper might be from very early in the pandemic (and... wrong). Or most likely the comment above has simply misinterpreted it, deliberately or not.

An IFR of 0.15% for covid is laughably ridiculous.

Stop arguing. Read the paper. The parent did not misinterpret it. It is not from early in the pandemic. You are wrong.

> Don't call it the flu. It's not the flu.

The original commenter didn't call it the flu as far as I can tell. He wrote: "Is there some reason to expect that covid-19 is different in long term effects than a flu? This study is saying it causes substantial brain damage, right? What possible mechanism is there for this?".

Nowhere did he call it the flu.

> It's killed 20x more people than the flu even in the fact of pervasive society-changing mitigation strategies (all while the flu itself has all but gone extinct, remember! All that masking and distance learning actually worked!).

No. It killed 20x more people than the flu in 2020 to now. But the flu has killed far more people overall. The flu epidemic of 1918 killed 50 million people, far more than covid.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/reconstruction-19...

> Beyond that, nitpick with my phrasing all you like. This is HN, after all.

It's not the phrasing, you know that. You outright contradicted the CDC which makes your comment misinformation.

> It's not the flu.

In your zeal, you falsely attributed a statement/argument to a person and argued against it. In one of my philosophy classes, I learned that it was called building a straw man. It's a logical fallacy.

Your heart may be in the right place, but you aren't helping. Though I'm starting to believe the fanatics on both sides deep down want covid to ravage the world and that neither side has their heart in the right place.

Look, nitpick. Claim I'm making a straw man argument, anything you want. All that is fine, and totally on brand for this web site.

Do. Not. Liken. Covid. To. The. Flu.

If you didn't, good! Don't.

Why not? They have many things in common. For example make they both make you sick, often with similar symptoms.

If you're arguing that you shouldn't dismiss the danger of covid because of its flu like nature, then be my guest but asking not to make comparisons between things doesn't strike me as a very smart thing to do.

Covid can be dangerous and similar to the flu at the same time.

That's not a logical fallacy. A logical fallacy would be concluding that "all black things are cats" from the sentence "all cats are black".

> because the CDC says on their website that the flu is more dangerous than covid for young people.

Depends what you're defining as young people. Under 5 as in those quotes, maybe virtually no risk. But I know otherwise healthy people in their 20s who got sick over a year ago. Their sense of smell and taste is still completely fried with no sign of recovery.

Maybe that can happen with a bad flu sometimes, but it seems way more common with covid. It seems like there's some nerve damage resulting from the virus that we don't yet fully understand.

The vaccine seemed like a safer gamble than potentially forever losing my ability to taste, or worse.

> Their sense of smell and taste is still completely fried with no sign of recovery.

This is exceptionally rare. The vast majority of people who develop anosmia regain their smell and taste. And yes, it does happen with other viruses.

> Maybe that can happen with a bad flu sometimes, but it seems way more common with covid.

The danger here is the distance between what it "seems" like, and what it actually is. If you're basing your judgment on media reports, you have to understand that you're not getting a balanced picture. The news media dwells on the most exceptional examples, and neglects the (many more) examples of people who have no serious side effects at all.

> It seems like there's some nerve damage resulting from the virus that we don't yet fully understand.

The current best evidence is that the loss of smell is not nerve damage, but infection of the epithelial cells surrounding the nerves in the nose.

I'm basing my experience on people I know who got infected. So are many other people who got vaccinated.

People who are screaming about the vaccine being a bigger risk than the virus are the ones being fed info by outrageous media reporting.

> I'm basing my experience on people I know who got infected. So are many other people who got vaccinated.

At this point, I know -- quite literally -- well over a dozen people who have had it. Varying ages. None had anything more than a mild illness. Nobody had lingering symptoms of any consequence (maybe a cough).

Either your sample is statistically skewed, my sample is statistically skewed, or....there is some creative remembering happening here.

> People who are screaming about the vaccine being a bigger risk than the virus are the ones being fed info by outrageous media reporting.

I am not going to defend every person saying this, but there are certain age groups in which this is absolutely true. The EU is not recommending vaccination of children for exactly this reason.

This seems like an overly pedantic approach. How many children younger than 5 are around posting on HN?

Granted, people here may have children of that age. But we're also talking about the expected value of vaccines as well. While I haven't kept on current information, last I heard vaccines also weren't approved for such young kids either.

Could they have been more exactingly accurate with their language? Sure. But the issue was small and basically entirely irrelevant given both the venue and topic at hand. Yet you basically tried to present this as an all-round smashing of their entire point.