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Comment by TheSocialAndrew | Hacker News Reader

If the mutations continue, at some point the mortality rate will likely meet the mortality rate of the seasonal flu. Hopefully we can then compare COVID to the season flu on any large media outlet / platform without being canceled, so that we can accept it as such and not rework our lives a dozen times a year around restrictions.

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According to the CDC, the flu caused 12,000-52,000 deaths a year in the US between 2010-2020 [0]. While covid caused more than 800,000 deaths in the US over the past two years, and more than 36,000 US deaths over the past month alone [1]. At this point, covid is still orders of magnitude deadlier than the flu.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html [1] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_totaldeaths

...it’s 12k-50k per year. So just (“just”) one order of magnitude or so.

Since June 2020, flu deaths have been in the single digits or teens most months, while covid deaths have been in the thousands or tens of thousands each month [0]. So covid is around 3 orders of magnitude more deadly than the flu.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm

Can't compare apples and oranges. For flu seasons, regular classification applies. For pandemics, all persons that die with Covid are Covid deaths.

Apples and oranges.

is this also a thing in the states? in germany even people who died from accidents but have tested positive for covid (either pre or post mortem) are counted as died from corona - not kidding.

- https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/panorama/corona-tote-rki-stat...

- https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Wer-zaehlt-als-Corona-Toter...

It’s a thing in the States, too, and it makes it difficult to see the facts clearly. I have no idea why we’re handling the data on COVID so differently from previous diseases and pandemics, though I’d be interested to hear a plausible, non-conspiracy-theory explanation.

Cause of death is on the death certificate, but there is no law of nature that there must be exactly one cause. The assignment of cause of death is thought to be biased in many cases, perhaps even subject to political pressure. Maintaining consistency of public health statistics about COVID19 from one time to another (or from one locale to another) is very desirable to sustain the practical usefulness of the statistics in assessing consequences of public health measures. It may be reasonable to expect that classification of COVID19/non-COVID19 deaths by public health officials based on arbitrary but more objective measures (such as time period from COVID19 diagnosis to date of death, used in the UK) may improve the value of the statistic.

> previous diseases and pandemics

This is not a new problem. Life insurance companies believe that many suicides are misreported on death certificates as accidents because the person completing the certificate does not want to prevent recovery of insurance proceeds by the deceased beneficiaries; prevention of social stigma is also thought to reduce reporting of AIDS, STD's, suicide, liver disease, recreational drugs, etc as a cause of death.

There may be arguments for decades to come about who did well in controlling COVID-19 and who told the truth about it.

> I have no idea why

We are why. We are the subjects of both politics and medicine, a disconsonant duo locked in an awkward embrace, and they want to embrace us, gently guide us, and disturb us a little as possible, because we determine both the course of the pandemic and the will of the governed in the nations we inhabit, jostling about and wondering why.

During the pandemic, the CDC has been also been counting deaths with the flu [0]. So we do have an apples to apples comparison. And covid has been around 3 orders of magnitude more deadly than the flu.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/index.htm

I thought the pushback on the comparison to flu was the conclusion that's intended to draw. The 2018 flu outbreak hospitalized approximately 710,000 Americans[0]. Public health professionals generally thing flu should have more public attention, so saying we should be unconcerned because now we have another disease as impactful as flu, I can see them objecting.

0. https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

> likely meet the mortality rate of the seasonal flu

We should consider the possiblity that we are already there with omicron.

There is no guarantee of that at all. Many diseases get worse over time

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/dec/08/facebook-p...

> Hopefully we can then compare COVID to the season flu on any large media outlet

It will never happen, humans take more and more to recover from traumatic events and people who claim that it's time to put the traumatic event behind our back and go on with our lives are singled out as irresponsible .

See the 2008 financial crisis, we are still doing QE, Fed balance sheet would never go back to normal , we have scam companies worth hundreds of billions and perhaps the most scammy one just went above a trillion in financial value with no real tangible product presence in a market in which commands a 1% presence.

I guess it depends on the person, but this doesn't square with what I see, and I live in what's considered a very liberal area with relatively strict mandates. People are going to bars & clubs, eating out, holiday shopping, etc. Even people who are being more cautious right now are itching to get out and do stuff. I think we'll recover just fine.

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