| > Why don't we have the same lockdowns when influenza threatens to overwhelm hospitals each year? People keep making comparisons to flu, so it's useful to talk a bit about how covid-19 is much more lethal than flu. I know the numbers for the UK. Official numbers for flu are about 10,000 to 20,000 deaths each year. Official numbers for covid-19 are currently about 60,000. Already we can see covid-19 is much more lethal. But this ignores differences in counting. If we count flu using the same methods we're currently using for covid we see only a couple of hundred, fewer than 1000, deaths to flu each year. If we count covid using the same methods we use to count flu deaths we'd see at least 140,000 covid deaths. > Where is the focus on public health interventions We have internationally coordinated programmes of work to monitor which flu strains are active, then develop vaccines to target these, then to vaccinate as many vulnerable people as possible. |