[kupiakos]

COVID is not comparable to the flu. It's 3-20x as deadly depending on a variety of factors.

Smallpox would still be significantly more deadly than COVID individually, but I'd bet people would take lockdowns much more seriously for smallpox than they did for COVID, preventing a pandemic and resulting in fewer deaths overall. Especially because people believe falsehoods like "COVID is comparable to the flu" because it downplays the risk.

[stolenmerch]

Yes, for the entire population in aggregate. But the flu is deadlier to children than covid. Simplistically and reflexively repeating "covid is not comparable to the flu" obscures this fact to some degree. Not saying you are doing this, but making it verboten to compare the two is a bad practice, in my opinion.

[mlac]

The common comparison is used to say “it’s not so bad - it’s just like the flu!”.

You can compare anything you want (e.g. COVID and Cancer outcomes), but to say COVID isn’t so bad because lung cancer doesn’t kill that many people every year is a bad logical fallacy.

The Flu has a vaccination, it’s got natural immunity, and we have a good understanding of it. COVID was brutal even with social distancing measures (where the flu was greatly reduced by the measures last year), so I’m not quite sure what the takeaway is from the comparison.

[stolenmerch]

It's also important, I think, to consider this as time series data. There was a point very early on when the flu actually was more dangerous but it became taboo to say because it was obvious that wouldn't be true for long. However as covid becomes endemic and we get better vaccines/therapeutics/natural immunity, that will be true again. The death and hospitalization rate will settle to a rate comparable to the flu, but we're not there yet.

[mlac]

It’s all about what you’re measuring… Ebola is less dangerous than the Flu in terms of deaths per year, but it’s disingenuous to measure it that way, and that’s what I think is frustrating people in this thread about the comparison to the Flu.

But I am with you - I think this will settle in at some point, and it will be as back to “normal” as we can, with just some people dying of COVID instead of Flu or Pneumonia or whatever would have eventually taken them before.

The vast majority of people don’t want to be super-spreaders. No one thinks they are actually being a super-spreader, but COVID presents as either asymptomatic or as mild allergies for a portion of the population. Which makes it really hard to wrap one’s head around and a wicked problem from a public health standpoint - “It’s not so bad it’s like a mild cold - why should I change my life for that?” or “Wait, you mean my slight cough can end up killing the people I might infect if I go out tonight? But to me it just feels like seasonal allergies. It’s probably not covid”. Ideally the vaccinations will reduce the number of people who die from a mildly symptomatic person going out by some factor of x. Because we can’t have everyone with seasonal allergies shelter in place forever.

It’s impossible to determine how many people will die from the infection that a mildly symptomatic person has if they go to the mall. In aggregate, it’s not zero (otherwise the pandemic would run its course and not be a problem). Sure, even if it’s a 1% chance someone with mild symptoms transmits COVID if they go to a busy shopping mall, that person has a 1% chance of death. But then they may spread it. So maybe it eventually results in .01, 0.1, 1, or 10 people dying per mildly symptomatic person going shopping? There are so many variables it’s nearly impossible to model, and every variable is now a political issue (contagiousness, are deaths really caused by COVID, vaccination rate, masking and distancing). And if the virus mutates and becomes the next more contagious variant in that person, then it could be hundreds of thousands of people.

But at some point, we have to say “OK - can’t test everyone, we have enough vaccinated people to be good, and this is reality - we need to accept a 0.01 “death factor” for this disease when a mildly symptomatic person participates in society. And I do think (or hope) that eventually that factor will line up more closely with the Flu - or ends up better than the flu’s factor (which is non-zero, but it’s a fact of life so we just keep it moving through Flu season).

To be fair, we don’t know if the population of people at the mall would die at the same rate as what COVID is doing overall with the population.

[nickthemagicman]

30ish% fatality rate of small pox.

I think Black Plague was like 60% fatality rate and killed so many people that it's theorized it paved the way for the enlightenment by disrupting entrenched economic stratification.

Covid is essentially the flu compared to a real historical pandemic.

There were not any 'black plague' deniers.

[marcosdumay]

> COVID is not comparable to the flu. It's 3-20x as deadly

Well, there are you, comparing them.

If you do the same with smallpox you will get unrecognizable high numbers.

[kupiakos]

"comparable" was interpreted to mean "similar risk profiles", which is not true.

We don't have a recent smallpox outbreak to compare to for mortality with modern medical treatment. It's possible smallpox is only 5% deadly these days, we just don't know.

[chasil]

This is a good history on the effects and changing forms of treatment.

"The case-fatality rate varied from 20% to 60% and left most survivors with disfiguring scars. The case-fatality rate in infants was even higher, approaching 80% in London and 98% in Berlin during the late 1800s."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/

[rossdavidh]

Depends on the flu, and on how effective that year's flu vaccine is. The 1918-1919 flu had its highest mortality rate in the young adult range, where it was unquestionably higher than covid-19 (although the lack of PCR tests or equivalent back then make it difficult to arrive at precise numbers infected). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu#Epidemiology_and_p...

[kupiakos]

Comparing modern death rates to the 1919 flu, and to historical smallpox infection, is not useful. Medical technology has come a long way in a century and so average mortality rates have dropped for all diseases.

2019 and 2020 had particularly dangerous flu seasons and were still significantly less deadly than COVID.

[jjk166]

The 2020-2021 flu season was the mildest flu season on record. In the US, there were only about 700 influenza deaths in the 20-21 season, compared to 22,000 in the 19-20 season, and 34,000 in the 18-19 season. Similar trends were seen around the world.

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/flu-has-disappear...

[elzbardico]

Yes, modern technology have improved health care, but also increased the avenues of spread.

[rossdavidh]

2019-20 and 2020-21 were both actually milder flu seasons than normal, I believe you might have been thinking of the 2018-19 flu season?

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html

Also, the principal advantage modern medicine had in these flu seasons, compared to 1918-1919, was that we had an effective vaccine for the most at-risk population to take, and the most at-risk were not the ones most likely to be out and about working. I've never seen a convincing explanation of why the 1918-1919 flu hit young adults the hardest, but whatever the reason, we're really lucky covid-19 did not work that way.

[schrodinger]

Give the benefit of the doubt. It’s certainly deadlier but still comparable in the scheme of things relative to a 30% death rate virus. I’m vaxxed and have a booster, mask up, and def not a denier but it’s true that the death rate of covid is fairly low for most folks.

[hunterb123]

The amount of apologizing and disclaiming in this thread is sad.

You shouldn't have to announce your medical history to compare fatality rates of a virus.

[gfodor]

You’re right. People are triggered by the comparison.