[whb07]

And in that time span about the same people died from the "regular" flu.

Speak for yourself, the "concept of freedom" that you talk about is one of the many reasons the U.S is what it is. The freedoms we have do have costs at times like these but the benefits vastly outweigh the costs.

[ceejayoz]

“It only killed as many as the flu” is a weird talking point.

It killed that many with an unprecedented shutdown of the entire global economy to mitigate it.

[whb07]

Yeah....no. Funny how this line of thinking goes. Serological studies starting to come out and they are showing rates above 25% of the population being infected. Study out of Germany reports that CFR is 0.3%. Theres a news article out of Chicago where the drive thru testing reported more people had the antibodies than tested positive.

[umanwizard]

Got a link?

[ModernMech]

Probably this? https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/04/09/999015/blood-tes...

[scottlocklin]

Do you think the flu doesn't respond to the measures taken against corona-chan?

[ModernMech]

Surely it does, but the CDC estimates that there have been 24k-64k deaths so far this season from flu [1]. That's over a 5 month span so that averages 4.8k - 12.6k deaths per month. Lockdowns really only started going into effect in that last month of the 5, so most of this time the flu was running around unmitigated by social distancing.

Now compare to coronavirus, where we were late to start but eventually locked everything down, and we still have 17k deaths in less than a month, and we know that's a lower bound. We're not even a month past the first 100 deaths. The death rate now represents infections 2 weeks ago, which we measured at 14k. After that we started measuring 30k+ new infections daily, so the death rate is likely to get worse by the time we hit 1 month.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/preliminary-in-season-e...

[ceejayoz]

The point: Comparing annual flu deaths when we don't shut down the whole world to COVID-19 deaths when we do (especially to make the claim they're similarly dangerous) is insane.

If 100 people drown in lakes, that's not really odd. If 100 people drown in the middle of the Sahara a thousand miles from the nearest water, that's weird.

[scottlocklin]

Looked to me like he was comparing flu deaths now to corona deaths now. If indeed those numbers are comparable or the same, we've probably made a terrible mistake. Maybe looking at total pneumonia deaths for anomalies is the right thing to do?

[ceejayoz]

> If indeed those numbers are comparable or the same, we've probably made a terrible mistake.

No, probably not. The seasonal flu infects a billion people a year, and still doesn't do things like collapse Italy's healthcare system.

[scottlocklin]

You're changing the subject: if indeed the number of deaths from flu and covid are the same, during a quarantine, we have made a terrible mistake. I have no idea if they are the same. Do you?

[dragonwriter]

> If indeed those numbers are comparable or the same

Well if you mean now now and not just annual totals or totals over the 2019-2020 flu season, they aren't the same or comparable, Covid-19 is the leading US cause of daily death, flu is way back in the pack.

[whb07]

This is definitely most, certainly not the case. I'll explain to you why:

A = set of top 5 disease killers in the U.S (hypertension, obesity, cancer, diabetes, etc)

B = set of corona deaths in the U.S

The intersection between B and A is over 90% of set B's numbers. So basic counting shows that in order to get the proper amount of deaths you'd have to perform the following calculation of:

A + B - ( intersection of A and B)

Unfortunately most people are counting by adding A+B which results in double counting as person X who died in set B is also in set A.

[dragonwriter]

> And in that time span about the same people died from the "regular" flu.

We're past the seasonal flu peak and coronavirus is still on the upswing and hasn't peaked, it's not only killing more people per day than the flu, but it's actually now reached the status of leading cause of death in the US.[0]

Even with countermeasures, covid-19 is, short of a literal miracle, going to kill far more people in the US than the flu this year.

And it's also going already contributing more to deaths by other direct causes by clogging hospital systems, consuming resources like ventilators, etc.

[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/health-news/coronavirus-bec...