4 ms·
At least here in the states I have a hard time believing that we could have a significant spike in deaths that are missed entirely. But maybe it's possible that
by tunesmith 7y ago
At least here in the states I have a hard time believing that we could have a significant spike in deaths that are missed entirely. But maybe it's possible that a death would be noticed and reported and handled through the proper channels, but that the count of the death itself would just get missed. And that we wouldn't notice until we compared deaths to population counts or something.
Here's another interesting way it could be masked. Perhaps flu deaths are decreasing substantially, but unnoticed covid deaths are being recorded as flu deaths to make up the gap - we wouldn't notice the spike because it would just be an absence of a dip. Maybe that wouldn't get noticed until our flu seasons in future years are weirdly muted.
- mcbits 7y agoI think the signal to look for is an increase in flu mortality rate in February-May compared to October-January if that kind of data exists. Confirmed flu cases are almost never also tested for COVID-19 due to the sheer number of flu cases, but even a small percentage of those being doubled up might change the mortality rate. They would also cause community spread because people don't take the same precautions for "just the flu".
- bagacrap 7y agoboth flu and covid kill the same kind of people, very old and frail ones. So in a sense they should be competitors, and they'll both kill fewer than if either disease were the only one.
- mcbits 7y agoCovid kills people who would survive the flu, so if someone catches both, they would have a higher chance of dying than from the flu alone, which would affect the flu's stats because these would be recorded as flu deaths.
- jfnixon 7y agoFlu kills children, covid-19 doesn't. Not sure if there is an 'expected' percentage of flu deaths in children, but if so, we might estimate the covid effect by looking at those numbers.