[perl4ever]

About 1500 people in the US died yesterday of covid; year-to-date, about 1300 people died each day of the flu.

So it seems like there should be no possible way to frame it as less severe than the flu, even only comparing to when the flu is at its worst and even assuming 100% of the population has covid or whatever other extreme things you want.

[ls612]

This can’t possibly be true about the flu. There’s been over 100 days this year and nowhere near 130000 people in the US have died of the flu in any year in recent memory

[perl4ever]

Good catch, I think I was using global figures from worldometer.

[dboreham]

aka lying

[smsm42]

Note that for the flu, most of the community does literally nothing. I mean, some people get vaccinated, but most literally ignore the flu as if it didn't exist - except if they get sick of course, and even then some people go to work if they can (they shouldn't, really, but they do).

If we compare this with complete shutdown of all public activity on the other end of the spectrum, we can see there are things we could be doing that are on neither ends. Maybe distancing but not shutdown, or avoiding some mass gathering but still being ok with individual meetings, or having places like restaurants operating at reduced capacity to ensure people aren't too close to each other, or ask people to wear masks when they enter stores, etc. And strict lockdown for places like nursing homes, but more relaxed for places like college, or having people of high-risk groups to work from home, but people with lower risk be allowed to work in the office. I'm not saying it's the right way to do right now, but it's a possibility, there are options.

So if this is e.g. 50 times worse than the flu, then trying any of the above may be too risky. But if it's kinda sorta like the flu, maybe somewhat worse but not 50x worse - then it may be prudent to consider measured response, given that for the flu we basically have no response at all and we're ok with that.

[perl4ever]

So, given that I was quoting global figures for the flu, on an apples-to-apples basis it seems like covid is about 10x the flu at the moment, in the US, ignoring the fact that it could be much worse without the lockdowns.

None of us know for sure, but isn't it plausible on the face of it that something 10x worse that could easily become 100x or 1000x worse warrants the lockdowns? I don't know if this is common sense, but in an alternate universe it could be.

[arcticbull]

> So, given that I was quoting global figures for the flu, on an apples-to-apples basis it seems like covid is about 10x the flu at the moment, in the US, ignoring the fact that it could be much worse without the lockdowns.

At about 10 weeks into the H1N1 influenza pandemic, we had a CFR of between 0.1 and 5.1% depending on the country as compared to 0.07 to 14.93% for COVID. H1N1 ended up with an actual IFR of 0.02% or one fifth of the low end of the CFR range.

Honestly, it's probably a maximum of three times as bad as H1N1, especially when you consider Italy later admitted of its 13.22% CFR, 88% of that number was "people who happened to die while COVID positive" instead of "likely died of COVID". [1] Huge deltas in CFR are likely attributable to mess-ups along the way and how COVID deaths are counted.

10X as bad is likely on the very highest end as Sweden hasn't locked down anyone, suggesting common sense instead, and their new case rate flattened out right alongside the rest of the world. 1000X is totally out of proportion with the data. [2]

I suppose we don't know for sure but we do have two and a half million data points which is enough to make a pretty good guess.

It's kinda starting us in the face that it's kinda like a bad flu except worse for old people, who we should lock down and look after as we build herd immunity.

[1] https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-...

[2] https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?location=Canada&location=Sw...

[badfrog]

> year-to-date, about 1300 people died each day of the flu.

That seems impossible. CDC estimates 61k flu deaths in 2017-2018 and 34k in 2019-2020: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

That is nowhere near 1.3k per day.

[perl4ever]

You are right, my point would have been much stronger with the correct figures.

[arcticbull]

That's not entirely true. The flu has a vaccine (of varying efficacy -- 10-60% depending on the year). The flu also has a large body of immunity built up across the population from having had it. It's also less contagious.

If we assume that COVID is spreading like wildfire (it is), and that we're front-loading the cases (we probably are), and that immunity will be built up as one-off instead of like having the disease mutate substantially every year like the flu, over a few years, it could easily be better.

I'm not saying it is or isn't, just that there is a path.