Flu deaths in the US (2017-2023) per week | Hacker News Reader

Flu deaths in the US (2017-2023) per week

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18 pointsbelltaco15 comments

Here's the corresponding graph for COVID.[1] About 10x flu deaths right now.

Notes: Death data takes a while to trickle in, so those grey lines for recent weeks reflect reporting delays.

[1] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_weeklydeath...

wow.. in its current settled down state Covid is still performing at around the worse that the flu has ever done in the last 5 years.

Its a nasty piece of work

“Nasty piece of work” are indeed the right words to describe it.

A lot of diseases saw a huge reduction in infection rates. RS virus, what we in Sweden call vinter vomiting disease (calci virus or norwalk virus) and common cold.

So wash you hands and try not to touch your face, people.

What happened to the flu in 2020 and 2021?

Isolation during corona/covid prevented the transmission of disease.

This, but also because Covid is far more easily transmitted than the flu, measures like masks, hand washing, etc were actually highly effective at stopping the spread of the flu.

...to the point of extinction, for at least one strain.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/covid-may-have-pushe...

Probably also the fact that Covid wiped out much of the target demographic.

In the US, a bad flu kills around 1K people per week during the winter. Covid killed 5K people per week even during the summer, for 2 years.

If Covid deaths continue to drop, next winter might finally be comparable to that "just a bad flu".

The low hanging fruit can't be picked twice.

That, and how many unhealthy/vulnerable people just die on average week for no particular reason? Seems like at least some of those individuals should be cases of a flu/virus taking the credit for something that may have happened on its own regardless. Reminds me of these uncommon 'horror stories' of young people dying the first time they did a bump of cocaine - all of them had very serious underlying issues that they were unaware of to begin with.

Entirely? Could you point to some sources on this?

I have heard this theory, would like to know more information.

I’m curious why you’re interpreting it as transmission was stopped entirely. Clearly that’s not what was meant given that the weekly deaths still were above zero.

I'm curious as to why you're interpreting the "entirely" as stopping transmission.

I meant, is it entirely the cause of the massive drop (to near nil) that year?

You didn't answer the main point of my post with any information.

You just deflected on the first word, which you interpreted wrong in the first place.

Still haven't seen a source on this claim, noone has in this thread.

So link please?

> I'm curious as to why you're interpreting the "entirely" as stopping transmission.

You were replying to:

> Isolation during corona/covid prevented the transmission of disease.

Because transmission was the singular subject of the parent comment. You failed to include the necessary context to make your point clear.

> So link please?

Yeah, I’m not inclined to go find something like that for a claim I didn’t make. What I will offer is an analogy for why I have no problem accepting the claim to be quite convincing. If we were to put a filter in an air stream and observe that the concentration of 5 micron particles has been significantly reduced downstream of the filter, would we really need to be skeptical of a claim that the filter was responsible for nearly completely eliminating 20 micron particles downstream? While the effectiveness of this analogy is of course going to hinge on how well the arbitrary numbers line up with reality, I find the explanation far more likely than the alternative of some combination of gross, universal incompetence and conspiracy.

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