Hacker News Reader

Comment by nkohari | Hacker News Reader

Influenza kills thousands of people under 18 every year: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

We are actually _incredibly_ fortunate that Covid spares children to the degree that it does.

> Influenza kills thousands of people under 18 every year:

No, not only does this exaggerate the normal annual impact, but it has killed far fewer (about half) in that age group than COVID has during the COVID crisis. Most of the COVID countermeasures (everything other than the vaccine itself) are effective against the flu, too, and COVID is much more dangerous (considering both deadliness and infectiousness) than the flu even to kids.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Se...

> Influenza kills thousands of people under 18 every year:

No, it does not. You didn't actually look at the numbers. One of the worst years overall shows 115 for 0-4 and 528 for 5-17:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm

There are some years where the total is a little over a thousand, but most are well below.

Don't spread this bull.

With apologies, I'll correct myself: flu kills hundreds, sometimes thousands of children per year. My point still stands, though: an equal or greater number of people under 18 are lost every year to influenza than have been lost to Covid. It's important to keep that in perspective, is all I'm saying.

> My point still stands, though: an equal or greater number of people under 18 are lost every year to influenza than have been lost to Covid.

This is false if you include the period during which COVID-19 has been around in “every year”, because COVID countermeasures also suppress the flu. Without COVID countermeasures, and without vaccination for most kids, COVID would kill far more than the flu normally does. Now, the COVID vaccine right now is more effective than the flu vaccine usually is (but that may be temporary if COVID is endemic and different variants proliferate), so with vaccines available to younger kids than now that might get evened out or reverse, but right now COVID is clearly far more deadly to kids.

You can't make a direct comparison between a global pandemic and a normal year for influenza. In future years there won't be as many opportunities for people to be infected with Covid, further reducing the risk.

I'm already bored to tears talking about this, though. The only point that I'm trying to make is that we have always accepted a certain level of mortal risk to people, including children. At some point, we are going to have to do that with Covid as well.

So looks like more kids were hospitalized and more died from the flu? What bull are you referring to? Were you outraged about them in any of the last 20 years?

> What bull are you referring to?

The bull that was clearly quoted? "Influenza kills thousands of people under 18 every year". The linked data does not say that at all.

You're being difficult just to be difficult here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com