[stickydink]

I have never known anybody that died of the flu.

I personally know of 4 people (in 2 different countries) - family, friends, or family of friends, who have died from Covid. None were over 60. I don't know that many people.

This is not the same, stop believing this garbage.

[seizethecheese]

I'm not saying flu == covid, but since we're all talking about anecdotes, my grandmother technically died of the flu.

12-60k Americans die of the flu every year. So far 160k Americans have died of covid. Unless you've only been alive for a few years it's extremely unlikely you know 4 people that have died from covid and none from the flu...

[tinyo]

I agree that it's an anectdotal point, but I don't think it's extremely unlikely. Covid affects a greater age range and there may be lifestyle factors at play, some people may know many people at risk of covid and few who are at risk of flu. It may be extremely unlikely in a random sample, but this isn't a random sample.

[codezero]

(Just realized my comment is replying to you, but I think a bulk of it is directed at the GP - just wanted to clarify)

Covid is real and I don’t think the numbers lie, but I also think we’re at an unprecedented level of measurement and quantification and it does make me wonder - folks I know who’ve died of pneumonia in old age probably didn’t get “influenza” as a cause of death in recent years even if it was what ultimately kicked off the over all failure of their organs.

There are whole classes of causes of death that just lack data/information to know the set of causes and to correctly attribute them to the mortality.

Anyhow, I’m seeing this as a huge global experiment to quantify a novel virus, and for that reason it’s interesting and exciting while also terrifying and bad.

What I mean by that is, we’re in the middle of the storm, it doesn’t really make sense to compare this to something yet, it’s not over, and not even close to understood, so let’s just treat it with the same caution we’d treat any other uncontrollable global plague until we know better, with extreme caution and suspicion, and we should assume it could kill us all eventually. We’ve never successfully made a coronavirus vaccine. Think about that. Read up on the previous trials - a successful vaccine still brings a lot of scary things, like, what it does in the wild if another novel coronavirus shows up, or the potential for it to turn a mutation into a more lethal or more viral strain.

So yeah, let’s hunker down and hold on until we have this collectively under control and we can START to understand what’s going on.

[lovehashbrowns]

The CDC explains how its numbers are determined: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/how-cdc-estimates.htm

This part specifically covers your question:

> We look at death certificates that have pneumonia or influenza causes (P&I), other respiratory and circulatory causes (R&C), or other non-respiratory, non-circulatory causes of death, because deaths related to influenza may not have influenza listed as a cause of death.

Those numbers are used to give estimates. So if the people you know that died of pneumonia (I'm sorry) had that listed on their death certificates, it is likely they were counted as influenza deaths; if not directly by test results then by their death certificates.

I agree with the rest of your comment, however. What was particularly frustrating for me was at the beginning of this pandemic; people were looking at the numbers and saying, "oh only x thousand deaths? That's less than a flu season!" (where x is less than 60) Of course they didn't mention that ~60,000 deaths is the worst flu season in the US, and other seasons see way less numbers than that; and they didn't mention that that's 60,000 deaths in a year. We're now at 183K deaths from covid so far. And the end isn't even in view..

[codezero]

Super helpful, thanks for providing that resource, I'll go update my knowledge.

Edit: Almost every time I comment on HN, I wonder if I sound like a bad GPT-3 implementation.