[DanBC]

> it's worth noting that the "flu" has been killing a large number of people year in and year out for as long as we can remember.

> The long-term death rate of COVID-19 remains to be seen.

At the moment we count flu deaths differently to covid-19 deaths.

Counting deaths due to flu is hard. We've only just started this work for Covid-19 by putting in standards for death certification. These stats lag the real time counts by some time, and they're always higher than the real time counts.

So, we're taking a method for counting flu than over-counts, and a method for covid-19 that undercounts, and then saying "covid-19 isn't that bad".

And that's just looking at deaths. We also need to look at hospitalisation (because we want to look at all the harm caused by different illness to assess whether our measures are reasonable or not; and because iatrogenic harm is a thing) and we see that covid-19 does put a lot more people in hospital than flu normally does. And this difference is only partly explained by rates of immunisation against flu.

[pbhjpbhj]

Well in England&Wales the National Statistics Office figures show <500 deaths (I think that excludes specific flus, H1N1 and such, which would add 4 more; ) for the most recent figures (2017 IIRC), for a ~60M population. Papers I've seen suggest a adults get flu every 5 years, children ~every 3 years. So we're looking roughly at rates of 500 per 15M. 1:30000.

Now there's some controversy that UK government have been reporting other deaths as flu, basically hiding Winter deaths due, eg to poor elderly care, in flu figures. So other sources suggest far far higher flu rates; but this is going off death registrations.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

Covid19 death rates for under 50s are something of the order 1:1000, 30x the flu rate in data I've seen most recent (Worldometer) but reported rates vary considerably.

[downerending]

That doesn't sound right. If fewer than 500 per year were dying of flu, we probably wouldn't even bother with flu shots.

[pbhjpbhj]

That's after flu shots, in the year where flu shots were a misfire (they guessed the wrong strains) there were 2000 additional deaths (according to another source I'm not confident in that claims to have ONS figures but which I've not been able to confirm); for comparison the reported deaths (ie hospital only) for UK [which includes Scotland] has passed 15000 for Covid19 according to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries [fwiw I wrote 10,000 as that was the figure last time I looked ... but then checked the current number ...].

Happy for you to show it if this is wrong.

[ghaff]

That seems very low. In the US, about 25,000 to 60,000 die annually of flu with about 5x the population of England and Wales.