[nl]

Indeed, the doesn’t carry a higher fatality rate part is factually incorrect. It's sad to see people spreading this kind of thing because it causes problems for their ideology.

COVID-19 has a fatality rate between 1 and 10%[1]. The variation is mostly due to testing - the places with the higher rate are under testing.

The flu has a death rate around 0.1% in the US - although that overestimate it because most people who get the flu are never tested and don't report it[2].

The flu is also much less contagious than COVID-19. Influenza has a R0 of between 0.9 and 2.8 (for the 1928 Pandemic stream). COVID-19 is between 3 and 6[3].

[1] https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

[2] https://www.livescience.com/new-coronavirus-compare-with-flu...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_reproduction_number

[nradov]

That is misinformation. The CDC's best estimate of COVID-19 infection fatality rate is under 1%.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

The link you posted is for case fatality rates. Those are essentially meaningless because so many infections are never counted as official cases.

[nl]

I'm comparing the case fatality rate for COVID and flu, since that is a like-for-like comparison and is about as far from misinformation as you can get!

I don't think you can get infection fatality rates for flu, since it is so low (and so many infected people are never tested) but feel free to provide them

[nradov]

That is not a like-for-like comparison because the case fatality rates weren't calculated using the same method.

[m0zg]

> COVID-19 has a fatality rate between 1 and 10%

There's a whole slew of reasons why even 1% estimate is bullshit. Consider this: median age of COVID death is currently 78 years old. US all-age life expectancy as of 2018 is 78.9 years. That is, approximately half the people who are dying of this would die anyway that same year. Now granted, expectancy is a mean, not a median, but you get my point.

1% CFR means 3.3 million deaths in the US alone if everyone gets it, which everyone eventually will, and which exceeds even the most ridiculous estimates from March of this year by a factor of 1.5, and is quite obviously not going to happen.

It's also ridiculously difficult to track down this median age number for the US, by the way. I wonder why that is.

That's before we even consider how the US has 760 deaths per million, and the likes of Iran or Russia (which have nowhere near the medicine the US has) report one half and one third that correspondingly.

So yes, C19 quite obviously has substantially higher CFR than the flu, but 9 months in nobody has any idea as to how much higher. Anyone who says otherwise is selling you something.

[nl]

> median age of COVID death is currently 78 years old. US life expectancy as of 2018 is 78.9 years. That is, approximately half the people who are dying of this would die anyway that same year.

This argument is nonsense.

Say there was a person with a gun, who pulled people out of a crowd, made sure their median age was 78, and then shot all of them. Approximately half the people who are dying of this would die anyway that same year.

The death rate is important.

> and the likes of Iran or Russia (which have nowhere near the medicine the US has) report one half and one third that correspondingly.

I assume you actually do realise why this is, right? Places are doing hard lockdowns and it is working.

> It's also ridiculously difficult to track down this median age number for the US, by the way. I wonder why that is.

Do you mean the median COVID death age?

The CDC is publishing this which should help: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Ag...

Not sure what you are implying by "I wonder why that is"

[m0zg]

> Places are doing hard lockdowns and it is working.

Russia isn't doing "hard" lockdowns. I know because I have relatives there. Schools are open. Airlines are flying. Where there are restrictions, they are pretty mild.

For that matter Sweden, which has _no_ lockdowns still has 150 deaths per million less than the United States. Italy, which had severe lockdowns, has a comparable number of deaths per million (from which it follows lockdowns aren't "working" as well as you imply unless you catch the spread very early and are able to close the borders a-la NZ).

The difference is mostly how deaths are counted, not the CFR per se. If you only count people dying of COVID as a primary cause, you get Russia/Iran number. If you count people run over by a bus who also had COVID, you get the US rate. Which one is better is up for debate, the point is you can't compare if you don't count the same way, nor can you even tell the CFR accurately if you count deaths where COVID was merely present, but did not cause the death per se.

[dragonwriter]

> Consider this: median age of COVID death is currently 78 years old. US life expectancy as of 2018 is 78.9 years. That is, approximately half the people who are dying of this would die anyway that same year.

You are confusing life expectancy at birth of 78.9 for life expectancy at age 78 of 0.9, that's not correct. Life expectancy at age 78 is 9.43 years for males, 10.98 years for females.

[m0zg]

Yes, and a lot of those 78.9 year old COVID patients will survive, although of course their probability of death is much higher. The point is not that. The point is it's dumb to pretend that the CFR is going to be uniform, and that just because it's 2.2% in the US at the moment, it can be linearly scaled up to the entire population (which is what would need to happen if we are to compare it to the flu, which easily 60% of people get in any given year), given the underlying demographics of fatalities. Downright dishonest, if you ask me.

Again, it is more dangerous than the flu. But nobody knows by how much, and nobody is even trying to find out as far as I can tell. Seems like a crucial question that needs to be answered, no?

[nl]

> The point is it's dumb to pretend that the CFR is going to be uniform, and that just because it's 2.2% in the US at the moment, it can be linearly scaled up to the entire population

This argument makes a lot more sense than your previous one.

> nobody is even trying to find out as far as I can tell.

As someone who has friends who have been working on this for months, I can assure you this is absolutely not true. There must be tens of thousands working on it, since the people I know are members of a group approaching 100.

Two of the big problems I hear about are:

Different interventions make modelling the effective reproduction number difficult, since this gets altered so much by the interventions

Different tests have different false positive (and false negative) rates and it is really hard to find out what test is used in which jurisdiction (and even harder to find that out historically).

It's not some big conspiracy. It's more that everyone Excel files are in different formats... sigh.