[mikekchar]

According to Wikipedia, influenza causes an estimated 41,400 deaths per year. 2017-2018 was the worst in 40 years and totaled about 61,000 (though the tally has not been finalised and some people have reported it as being as high as 80,000). The number of hospitalisations for the flue in that year was estimated at 800,000 people (clearly that isn't ICU). The number of medical visits was 21 million. I have no data for how many people were confirmed to have the flu, but were not hospitalised.

COVID-19 has killed 114,148 people to date. The number of hospitalisations are only reported up to the end of May 30 and appears to be 82 people per 100,000 people in the populations (thank you CDC for such an epically terrible statistic!) That works out to about 270,000 people. I'm going to use PCR tests as a proxy for "medical visits" for the flu, but in reality they aren't comparible. There are 22 million tests that have been carried out to date. The reason I use that as a proxy is I assume that there is reason to suspect that someone may have COVID-19 if they get a PCR test, just like there is reason to suspect that you have the flu if you have a "medical visit". The last piece of information would be the number of confirmed cases which is 2,045,549. So just under 10% of the cases that were tested were confirmed to have the disease.

Of the people who were hospitalised in the worst flu year in 40 years, about 10% died. Of the people who were hospitalised for COVID-19, about 42% died (well a little higher because I'm using June 10th data for deaths and May 30th for hospitalisations). The number of medical visits for the flu was 21 million in the worst year and the number of PCR tests for COVID-19 so far is 22 million (about the same). It may be a bad assumption,

Just to sum up (and sorry for those on mobile):

    Tested/Visits   Confirmed   Hospitalised   Died
     21,000,000    *1,900,000    800,000      61,000
     22,000,000     2,000,000    270,000     114,000

Where the asterisk means my esitmate which may be completely wrong. Edit: The first line is the flu and the second line is COVID-19

But any way you slice it, I don't think the numbers work out the way you are portraying it. Corrections to the above are very much welcomed!

[jakeogh]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23409223

Nit: There is no accoring to wikipedia. It's a perception management platform. Use it to find a source, nothing more.

[mikekchar]

That data does not actually agree with any other data I can get from the CDC web pages. Where did you get the link from? Even the total death rate is nearly half of the actual total death rate reported for those years.

Here's the data I was quoting: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

Here is 2017 from 2016 (which I believe is basically the 2016-2017 calendar year) national vital statistic report: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09-508.pdf

If you scroll down to Table B you can see that ~2,800,000 people died, influenza and pneumonia account for 55,000 deaths. This is more than that 33,000 cases of reported influenza because not all pneumonia is caused by the flu.

The data in your link is very strange in that it implies a rate of 10% of all deaths is by pneumonia, rather than the ~2% in roughly everything else I can find on the topic. I wonder if we are losing some context here?

Here is another mortality report. Just search for pneumonia: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_09_tables-5...

Literally nothing I can find on the CDC's website matches up with the data on that report so I'm at a loss what's going on with it. It's too bad there is no text because I think we're missing something.

[jakeogh]

"Even the total death rate is nearly half of the actual total death rate reported for those years."

Bottom of page:

NOTES: Data presented in this table are based on all complete death records received and processed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) as of March 17, 2016. Data for 2008 through 2014 are final data, while 2015 data are provisional. Due to the nature of provisional data, numbers are subject to change as additional death records are received. Influenza season is defined as early October through mid-May. Influenza and pneumonia deaths are defined as deaths with codes J09–J11 (any listed cause) and J12–18 (listed anywhere without influenza also listed), respectively, in the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision. SOURCE: CDC/NCHS, National Vital Statistics System, 2008–2015.

[mikekchar]

Alright. If you are unable to look at any other data than the one page you have. 7,961 deaths to influenza in 2015-16. Is that the number you think will show that COVID-19 is more deadly than the flu? Because, I've got to say that I don't think that number is better for you than 23,000 deaths that the data I'm pointing to. Oh, of course there are 131,858 deaths due to pneumonia from other causes. Clearly something pretty powerful that wasn't influenza swept through that year. It's pretty strange that we keep statistics on the piddly old flu when there is something killing 20 times as many people, but is completely unidentified. I'm so glad we agreed to use this data rather than literally any other page on the CDC website!

[jakeogh]

"that year"

It's not one year. The document covers 7 years. The pneumonia range is 126k to 138k. It's explicitely listed as "death records" and the source is given.