Imagining Covid is ‘like the flu’ is cutting thousands of lives short | Hacker News Reader

Imagining Covid is ‘like the flu’ is cutting thousands of lives short

theconversation.com

2 pointslnyan9 comments

COVID's IFR was only 60% higher than influenza's by February, it is literally "like the flu."

https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1492138139103768576

No matter what you say, some person charged up on stats and emotion is going to argue with you. They will trot out "1 million US deaths" (ignoring the complexity of that figure) and various other arguments. Don't worry, you're correct, many aspects of COVID resemble the flu and anybody who is making strong arguments about how to prevent deaths is just making stabs in the dark at this point.

It doesn’t matter if it’s like the flu or something else entirely. That’s just a poorly articulated way of saying “it’s not so bad that it warrants the restrictions”.

Restrictions are all but gone at least in Europe and society is still functional. And it would have been sans restrictions too.

> Restrictions are all but gone at least in Europe and society is still functional. And it would have been sans restrictions too

Society was functional during the Spanish flu as well; that's really not the point. The point of the restrictions was reducing the overall number of deaths.

Which, in the case of COVID, is not exactly a great argument for the restrictions either considering that after two years of COVID the world has experienced less than 7 million recorded deaths [0] compared to, at a minimum, after two years of the Spanish Flu we were looking at 17 million deaths (though it could be closer to 50 million) [1]. And that's with a global population that is an estimated 3-4x greater than the world population of 1918 [2] and with far easier global travel.

[0]https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu [2]https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-populat...

I don’t get that argument, reducing the number of deaths is quite a good argument regardless of previous pandemics.

Also I wouldn’t compare Covid deaths with Spanish flu deaths. The access to health care and the quality of health care is totally different today than in 1918.

I think it’s wrong todo such comparisons as an argument against the restriction.

I could also imagine that the number of flu death went down due to restrictions (would be good to know if this is true).

After two and a half years of this BS, I'd like to posit a counterargument:

IF we treated the flu the way we treated C19 for the first two years, i.e. no treatment until critical and then with remdesivir, "the flu" would be killing a lot more people.

Frustrating that people seem to forget that COVID took a dramatic change in course between delta and omicron. Before omicron appeared, the numbers remained concerning. Afterwards, "it's a flu". Fortunate that it did.

So many dogmatic people insisting their view of the virus is the correct one. I'd like to see a lot more hubris.

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