Now, influenza kills lots of people; in 2018 over 60,000 people were killed by influenza in the USA alone. But we don't have border closing or "show your papers" or all the rest for influenza, and we're not going to.
Just because you feel back to normal after getting over an illness it doesn't mean there isn't a permanent hit taken in terms of future repair & recovery capacity.
I suppose the argument is that Covid-19 causes more long term damage in many people when compared to other similar illnesses? That's interesting, but part of me wonders if this is just a false flag due to how much research there is going into covid.
Why would you even think that it's a false flag? I'm lost as to your logical progression.
It's not like it was ever ok that the flu killed tens of thousands of people every year in the US alone. It's just not a thing that is going to be going away, so the tradeoff of temporarily staying home or wearing masks or etc. is different than if you think it will be gone in a few months.
COVID deaths in the U.S. over a two year period amounted to over 1 million.
Also, in my country, a lot of people got Omicron - and I mean a lot - realised it didn’t do much and pretty much stoped worrying.
Case numbers and deaths seem to be plateauing at a pretty low rate, especially considering the relaxed restrictions these numbers are occurring under. It seems reasonable to think that we won't suddenly see a more dangerous strain of this particular virus, or that vaccines will lose a significant amount of effectiveness.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
It still (just barely) shows part of the 2018 influenza spike, which is pretty similar to where we were at in July (note that the last few weeks on this chart are likely to come up a bit, but from what I've seen they don't rise much once they're 2-3 weeks old).
Now it's always possible that the winter will be just like 2020/21 and 2021/22 winters, in terms of deaths, but I highly doubt it. Anyone who has not either been infected or vaccinated (or both) by now, is almost certainly naturally resistant. There isn't much of an "immunologically naive" population left.
Where we are now is analogous to influenza in 1920, just after the big flupandemic of 1918/19.
Look up how many deaths occurred in the 2-year 1918-1919 period.
It's remarkable how few people died from flu the last 2 years. I know people were (probably still are) being tested for COVID when visiting the hospital. Do we test for flu?
I also feel COVID deaths are overblown, should probably be much lower in these graphs (many people that died /with/ COVID have been marked as dying /from/ COVID).
We know it isn't accurate because we know that large numbers were merely covid positive when they died (often using an inaccurate testing method)
Providing perverse funding incentives to hospitals distorts the data
Do you have any idea how the calculations are performed to arrive at that number?
I suggest you take some time to investigate. When we are talking about the US, in particular, the whole pandemic has been politicized
Excess deaths doesn't care what your cause of death was, it just compares deaths in period X to deaths in previous periods.
> When we are talking about the US, in particular, the whole pandemic has been politicized
Yeah, it was very sad to see the Republicans and Trump in particular pursue that course of action.
The population is growing and hence the number dying is also growing. The way you handle the data to determine what is considered 'excess' changes the value.
Actuarial science has been used to make that determination in more recent studies. Those studies suggest that the 'excess' number used by politicians and in news media is not accurate.
Actuarial science used by insurance companies now shows historic changes in occurrence of deaths, over this period of time, that are not caused by SarsCoV2.
Again, I suggest you investigate where the information comes from that you consider to support you base assumptions.
So to eliminate influenza we just need to destroy the economy, restrict travel, force people to pay $1000s in quarantine, cover our faces and close schools and office. And ignore all the negative consequences of that. Got it.
Your comment "almost vanished because we started using hand sanitizer and facemasks." is false. It was much more than that.
EDIT: and your links prove a reduction in influenza, yes, not "taught us that we don't need to accept so many deaths by influenza". That's a much wider debate and involves much more than scientific studies
I am also sorry that you don't like the “we don't need to accept”. I merely meant that we should have learned by now that we can avoid lots of influenza infections by very simple means, of which improved hand hygiene is probably the most important (I don't have time to look for links, so feel free to ignore the claim).
Denmark has no COVID-19 restrictions, but we do have extensive influenza sentinel surveillance, so we will see how it goes in the upcoming influenza season.
We do have "show your papers" for influenza. For example: https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-8-part-b-chapter-...
That's weird.
That's what we're hoping for - and it's generally the trajectory novel viruses take - come out of the gates with a bang and a whallop into a vulnerable population, eventually tone down as people build immunity and selective pressures favour mutations that don't dramatically and fearfully kill their victims.
> But we don't have border closing or "show your papers" or all the rest for influenza
We very much did when H1N1 killed millions from 1918 to 1920. Closing the borders, lockdowns, quarantines etc. Not so much "show your proof of vaccination" due to well, you know, there not being a vaccine for influenza then.
However, you might find this illuminating - a 1905 Supreme Court decision upholding the authority of states to enforce compulsory vaccination laws. [0]
> and we're not going to.
If a novel strain of influenza were to emerge that current vaccines can't handle, and it was proving to be highly efficient at causing severe illness or death, you really don't think similar preventive measures would be taken?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts
Unless long COVID turns out to be a real and serious thing...
It is not real insofar one assumes COVID is special or particularly more dangerous in this regard. It isn’t, except for temporary loss of smell and reduced aerobic capacity.
Also see https://kirkegaard.substack.com/p/how-unreal-is-long-covid
The posters on https://www.reddit.com/r/covidlonghaulers/ would disagree with you
Echo chamber, filter bubble, etc etc
/cue accidental rap battle
Well obviously; that's a tautology. The question is how it actually differs per epidemiology.
The only difference is that Covid caused the number of viral infections to skyrocket, and with that, we see a corresponding jump in the occurrence of post-viral autoimmune disregulation, so now there's more effort being spent on finding out what's really going on.
For me, the only thing I care about is if I need to wear a mask and if I need to have a vaccination to do things. If I need to have a vaccination pass to do things then I don't think we should be getting charged for getting it. And I just hate wearing masks.
Instead we are looking at plentiful deaths and accumulating damage courtesy of even mild infections. We aren't actually going back.
Except for when we do shut things down.
It's far from without precedent for the government to mandate personal safety requirements, tho. Seatbelt laws for cars are near universal in the US and that's a much more only-effects-you decision compared to vaccination.
Also, seatbelts are removable which people would say makes that comparison irrelevant.
So no.
You are comparing number of deaths as opposed to rate of death per infection. The number of COVID infections are orders of magnitude higher than the number of flu infections. The rate of death from COVID per infection is now lower than the flu.
https://www.ft.com/content/e26c93a0-90e7-4dec-a796-3e25e94bc...
Now wait a second … that's not a bad idea!
Comments about "show your papers" are bullshit. We had an opportunity to prevent this from becoming a pandemic, and once it became a pandemic we could've worked together to limit spread and protect one another. Instead we had a large chunk of society that decided letting COVID burn through millions of victims was preferable to wearing a mask or not having parties.
--
CDC says the 2018-2019 Flu season killed about 28K people, hospitalized 375K people. The vast majority of those were in the 65+ age group. (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html) The 2017-2018 season estimate was 61K, the 2019-2020 estimate was 22K, prior years from 2010 through 2017 were as high as 51,000 and as low as 12,000.
The U.S. is averaging 400-500 deaths from COVID per day. If you split the difference and call it 450, that's more than 160,000 per year. Note that COVID numbers are probably shaky given that we have states like Florida trying to block reporting, and inaccuracies in reporting since COVID deaths may be misreported (e.g. someone recently "recovered" from COVID dies of stroke or heart attack that may be linked to COVID but the person isn't tested for COVID or isn't currently testing positive but the death is likely a result of COVID).
So, our averages are far higher than Flu and that doesn't even take into account deaths we aren't counting as COVID. The excess deaths reported from March 2020 - March 2022 were 15% higher than reported COVID deaths.
We also have no evidence of "long-flu" the way we're seeing complications of COVID infections long past the initial sickness.
And we don't yet know if we've reached a plateau or if we have more mutations/waves in front of us that will spike numbers. Or, maybe we are seeing the tail end and we'll stay at current numbers or decline further.
Several experts are predicting a fall surge - which may or may not happen, and may or may not be severe. Like Flu, yes, many people now have some exposure and/or have been vaccinated -- so COVID is less "novel" and may keep declining in severity, but given lax attitudes towards masking and vaccinations/boosters and other precautions, we'll see more sickness and death than we need to.
Anecdotally: Between March 2020 and March 2022 I knew maybe two people in my immediate circle of friends and family (about 30 people) who tested positive for COVID, and two who likely had COVID but didn't get a positive test. The two likely cases were prior to vaccine availability and one of the couple works in health care and had no real way to isolate and avoid exposures. Happily, none of them died or were hospitalized.
Since March of this year my immediate family (4 people) and my wife's brother & his wife (who's pregnant and being super-cautious) are the only people I know who haven't tested positive for COVID at least once. Most of my co-workers have had it. While, again, no one has required hospitalization or has died, the reported symptoms & after-effects often are higher in severity with a case of the flu. We're talking weeks long "brain fog" and loss of smell/taste, shortness of breath, and so forth in several cases. (To be fair, some cases have been mild - usually spouse or children of someone who's been sicker, but tested positive after exposure.)