[throwaway290]

Not from US. I understand why democrats and centrists worried about COVID origin and lab leak theory and that it was suppressed. But the extreme right of all people, how do they explain it if their previous line was literally "COVID doesn't exist or is not worse than any flu"?

[amalcon]

It's pretty simple actually: the lab leak theory is what allows Trump to maximally blame other people. The ability to always blame other people is the most important thing to Trump, even above his usual motivations of always being perceived as correct and never blaming himself. Blaming other people is priority number one.

[tim333]

I don't think "covid doesn't exist" was ever a widespread position, and you could argue it's not as bad as some flus.

[throwaway290]

> don't think "covid doesn't exist" was ever a widespread position

Semantics... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/03/donald-trump...

> you could argue it's not as bad as some flus.

A flu kills at most 50 000 people per year in US. Remind me which flu killed 1+ million in 2 years and cost US 16 trillion bucks?

[tim333]

Spanish flu, started in Kansas, killed 50-100 million.

[throwaway290]

I said kills, present tense. But it's semantics. If there was a mega deadly spanish flu today and republicans said it's just another flu or don't exist it's all the same.

[ath3nd]

> could argue it's not as bad as some flus.

You could argue that, but you'd be dead wrong. Herman Cain kind of wrong.

Yes, you could argue that, if by "some flus" you mean the Spanish Flu of 1918. But if you are not a demagogue and not trying to twist words and try to compare Covid in 2020 to the flu in 2020, you'd be totally and BRUTALLY wrong.

Let's look at the numbers and do some rudimentary math:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1124915/flu-deaths-numbe...

6,300 people died of the flu in the US in 2020-2021

Now, let's visit how many people died of Covid in 2020 in the US.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1382334/number-covid-dea...

380,000 people died of Covid in 2020-2021

Now let's divide 380,000/6,300. We get the number 60. That's 60 times more deaths. One could then argue, but with data, that Covid was actually 60 TIMES worse than the flu in 2020.

Now you might say that 6300 deaths in the US during that time were unusually low for flu and go for the average annual number of flu deaths in the US which is about 25,000. Then we do the math and we divide 380,000/25,000, and we get 15.2. That tells you that in 2020 Covid was "only" 15.2 times worse than the flu. You've heard about the 10x programmer, it's apparently significant enough to mention something is 10x more than something else, so what about 15.2x times?

But yeah, generally you are right, it was not as bad as some flus. It didn't kill as many people as the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918, which is, I am sure, what many people thought of when their favorite demagogue fed them the narrative that it's "not as bad as the some flus".

> I don't think "covid doesn't exist" was ever a widespread position

Enough right-wingers pushed this BS that there are numerous articles fact-checking their unfounded claims.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/deep-dive-into-stupi...

https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-check-the-virus-t...

Enough right-wing figures also pushed the narrative that the vaccine didn't work (they were up to 17x times wrong, especially in the beginning of the pandemic):

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-compare-co...

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/red-blue-america-glaring-divid...

So you could argue a lot of things, but the numbers'd always prove you wrong.

[tim333]

I was thinking of stuff like the Spanish flu:

>Thus, the risk of dying from Spanish flu was >8 times higher than the risk of dying from COVID-19... https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/229/6/1928/7642231

Also flu may have recently passed covid for current US deaths https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2025/02/18/...

obviously in the middle of a pandemic more people will be dying of whatever the pandemic is.