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Comment by bmeski | Hacker News Reader

Please omit flamewar rhetoric, name calling, and personal swipes from your comments here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: since you've been doing this repeatedly (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29900612 was particularly bad), I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

Flu kills at most 50,000 people a year. Covid is 10x that. All my life I don't know anyone who's died from the flu, i know multiple people who died from covid. It is like comparing measles to chickenpox. Measles has a very similar mortality rate as covid.

Covid is comparable to the flu young people. Up till now (~ 2 years), 56395 Americans less than 50yo have died from Covid and 768688 people over 50yo have died.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-...

One of the worst flu seasons we had in the last 20 years in term of deaths. Covid has 10x the mortality rate for the age range 0 to 49. If you look at the H1N1 pandemic, which infected half of Americans and killed 20,000. It's on a full different scale. Covid hasn't infected half of Americans.

Covid is killing people who don't have covid. Elective surgeries are getting stopped which include cancer removal surgeries. ERs are full. There's cases of people dying of treatable heart attacks in parking lots because there are no beds. Has flu ever done that in the last 50 years?

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

https://www.wvtm13.com/article/alabama-heart-patient-dies-af...

> Covid is comparable to the flu young people

No it's not.

> Up till now (~ 2 years), 56395 Americans less than 50yo have died from Covid

In the worst flu year in the last decade, the 95% confidence interval for total (all ages) flu deaths is 44k-64k and the flu also skews older for deaths, with around 75% in the over 50 category.

56k in 2 years under 50 is much worse than the flu in that age group.

Is exchanging anecdotal evidence a substitute for good scientific argument?

My father died of the flu. A friend of my mother's sister died 10 minutes after taking the Covid vaccine. I don't know anyone who died from Covid but I know that of course it's happening.

My anecdote doesn't add anything to the discussion but then again, neither does yours.

At the beginning of the pandemic it had a 10x death rate because it was new. Now that Covid is becoming endemic, people are building up immunity to covid and it's variants, and you should expect the death rate to fall substantially, which is what we are seeing now.

> Measles has a very similar mortality rate as covid.

Measles overwhelmingly kills children. SARS-CoV2 overwhelmingly kills the elderly and frail. This is why we have historically mandated measles vaccination for children.

You can't simply use "mortality rate" over an entire population to claim the illnesses are similar, when it's trivial to see that they have different impacts.

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